Waste and recycling firm selects Cognos planning and analysis capabilities to streamline financial processes
Burlington, MA — February 7, 2006 — Rumpke Consolidated Companies Inc., one of the largest, privately owned waste and recycling firms in the United States, said today it has standardized on Cognos for financial planning and analysis.
Rumpke said that as its business continued to grow information management became more challenging. Rumpke decided to streamline its budgeting process by moving its manual collection of budget data to Cognos Planning software, which helps define and link the operational drivers for the planning, budgeting and forecasting process.
Adding Cognos' analysis capabilities allows Rumpke's staff to report and analyze their budget values before, during and after the process in real-time instead of using traditional flat, slow and static operational reports.
With Cognos, we have not only streamlined our budgeting process, but we have decreased month-end processing time from days to a few hours. We have discovered unprecedented capabilities in allocations, top-down and bottom-up changes, and the ability to quickly roll up the various regional budgets into an overall corporate budget, stated Debbie Pastura, controller, Rumpke. We now have a stronger platform for decision-making with multiple planning models to address regional diversity with defined corporate consistency. Our finance team is now able to proactively provide insightful analytics for overall productivity, payroll and landfill status by line of business.
Cognos said its performance management solutions provide organizations with a single line of sight across all time horizons. Planning and consolidation combine the forward management view of the business with the current and historical business observations and make the data available in a consistent corporate and management reporting environment. This integrated operational and financial view lets customers proactively address business challenges for greater operational effectiveness.
Our flexible planning solution enables Rumpke's Finance department to connect people and data collaboratively into an integrated process, reducing the time to create both budgets and forecasts and reducing the administrative burden on finance analysts so that they can spend a much larger percentage of their time on value-added analysis, said Doug Barton, vice president, Product Marketing, Cognos Inc. The end result is the creation of more reliable, predictable forecasts which are owned' by Finance and based on a consistent representation of data.
