Logicalis

Verna Group Ltd provides a total solution to human waste management in healthcare and is a global leader in this sector,creating cleaner, safer, greener healthcare environments across the world. The company shapes their strategy around the universal drivers of infection control, environmental performance and cost savings, helping customers to achieve all three critical objectives. IBM Cognos Planning has been a vital component in Verna’s strategic planning process for around 10 years. Whilst originally purchased to replace spreadsheet based budgeting, Verna, and specifically David Forman, Group MIS Manager at Verna, has developed their utilisation of the application in several ways: to collate their Management Accounts, for detailed sales reporting across products, channels and countries; cost allocations; and a quarterly rolling forecast.

A planning application to support business decisions

In collating their Management Accounts, Verna needed a level of data visibility and analysis that in Excel proved deficient. David explains; “We used Excel for very simple channel analysis, but we wanted to be able to analyse and manipulate our data in a more sophisticated way, using multiple dimensions.” David continues, “Each of our divisions are very different and don’t interact with each other that much. Our sales data comes from our Canada division through their ACCPAC system, and from the UK and South Africa through Sage. Utilising IBM Cognos Planning we look at hierarchies, customers, currencies, budgets, products against divisions and different prices, which we aggregate and reconcile. By reporting on the output we can make important decisions on capacity and production; this would have been practically impossible in Excel”.

Other areas in which Verna have utilised IBM Cognos Planning is with HQ cost allocations. “We have various cost centres such as IT, Finance, and Purchasing,” David explains, “Various nominal ledgers in Sage hold all the costs; we take each of those lines and can assign a driver to it. We can be as sophisticated as we want with these, for example, in IT, it may be the number of PCs, or salaries based on timesheet. These then drive costs to all the different divisions, and we can also drive costs to other cost centres, for example, IT are able to charge Finance and Purchasing, offering a full recharge system”. David describes the process: “Typically we allocate about 80% of the costs to the Profit centres on first allocation; the remaining 20% is reiterated through the model until all the costs are allocated to the profit centres”.

Challenge

To improve data visibility across the business, avoid Excel pitfalls and allow more opportunity for reporting analysis.

Why Inca (a Logicalis company)?

Verna values the collaborative style of support Inca provides, allowing them to become self sufficient application users, whilst offering guidance and assistance when required.

Solution

Verna utilises the IBM Cognos Planning application to collate their Management Accounts, detailed sales reporting across products, channels and countries; cost allocations; and a quarterly rolling forecast.

Key Benefits

Greater visibility of data: multidimensional data analysis provides with ability to make important decisions on capacity and production. More uniformity in end-user participation through roll out of IBM Cognos Contributor.