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Solid Waste Company Simplifies Budgeting and Forecasting Systems to Accelerate Efficient Decision-Making Processes

Casella Waste Systems, Inc., reduced the process burden on key staff, while providing senior management with timely and actionable business decision support information

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Executive Summary

Vermont-based solid waste services company, Casella Waste Systems, Inc., implemented Longview’s performance management application to transform its spreadsheet-based budgeting and forecasting system into a highly efficient, automated process. Significant improvements in data collection and consolidation, cycle time, and the ability to model and save different financial scenarios combined to reduce the process burden on key staff, while providing senior management with timely and actionable business decision support information.

Integrated Waste Management Solutions

Rutland, Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems, Inc. provides comprehensive solid waste management solutions to industries, businesses, municipalities, and residents primarily in the Northeastern United States. Beginning with a single truck in 1975, Casella has grown into a publicly traded, regional environmental services leader by successfully integrating numerous acquisitions into a platform of contiguously linked markets, enabling them to fully leverage their capital investments, as well as optimize operations and the use of assets and infrastructure. Casella’s $500 million per year business is built around 2,800 employees working in 90 operating facilities that include transfer stations, landfill sites, hauling companies, composting and grinding facilities, and recycleries.

Benefits At A Glance

  • Reduces budget and forecast cycle, saving valuable staff time and effort
  • Elimination of cumbersome spreadsheets lets staff do more thinking and less keying
  • Advanced “what if” modeling capability provides timely, actionable decision-support information
  • Simplifies budget and forecast consolidations across multiple business units and operating entities improving visibility and speed
  • Flexible platform that is easily adapted to customer’s way of doing business.

The Challenge

As Casella continued to grow, becoming a more complex organization with multiple business units and operating entities, it was soon discovered that their spreadsheet-based budgeting and forecasting process no longer met their needs. Excel spreadsheets developed over time were not only too numerous to manage efficiently, they had become so massive they were difficult to work with, especially for users in locations away from home office.

Manual Processes

In addition, the process of consolidating the spreadsheets from all operations into the JD Edwards General Ledger application had become very cumbersome. For example, when last minute changes or adjustments such as inter-company interest allocations and allocations for home office expenses and management fees were made, an extraordinary amount of manual effort was required on the part of Casella accounting staff to update the spreadsheets and re-consolidate the information on a timely basis.
“Budgeting had become a long and painful process using our old system,” claimed Chris Scherer, Director of Forecasting, Budgeting, and Operations Support at Casella. “And because of the underlying effort required to revise the budget information, ‘what if’ analyses were all but impractical to perform, making it difficult for senior management to explore possible business directions.”

Detail Revenue Forecast Requirements

Scherer went on to describe how budgeting and planning at Casella is a very granular process, involving detailed calculations for 30 to 40 percent of their P&L items and many of their balance sheet accounts. For example, based on what they receive in a single recycling load, they will often ship many different commodities—glasses, plastics, cardboard, paper, tin cans, etc.—so they need to be able to build a detailed revenue forecast by commodity and specific recovery programs. “We clearly needed a new forecasting and budgeting system,” said Scherer, “ but we wanted to be able to maintain that same level of granularity and control, while at the same time providing some flexibility to users.”

The Solution

To address their budgeting and forecasting problems, Casella chose the Longview Performance Management application, an integrated performance management application suite that gives enterprise customers the ability to streamline and enhance global finance functions, including management reporting and analysis, modeling, budgeting, planning, forecasting, and consolidation.

“We considered several other products as well, but the Longview application was the only one we weren’t able to “break” during our testing of these products. It could do everything we wanted it to do.”
Chris Scherer
Director of Forecasting, Budgeting, and Operations Support, Casella Waste Systems

 

Several Products Considered

“We considered several other products as well,” explained Scherer, “but the Longview application was the only one we weren’t able to “break” during our testing of these products. It could do everything we wanted it to do, including supporting our requirements for a very granular budget package, and was able to model the calculations the way we wanted.”

The Casella team spent a great deal of time and effort looking closely at the Longview application to ensure that it would fit their needs. They also talked to a number of people about the product, including their auditing firm, which was aware of similar products in the marketplace but felt that the Longview application was best suited to their organization.

Commenting further on Casella’s reasons for choosing Longview, Scherer goes on to say that “we found the Longview team very responsive, even to a relatively small customer such as Casella. We need to work with a partner that has the same vision as we do and can help us stay focused on what we’re trying to achieve; Longview is well suited for that.”

Flexible Design to Match Workflow Requirements

For the initial implementation, Casella chose to activate one key business processes—Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting. Longview’s Client Services group was engaged to help them detail their functional specifications and build a technical design based on configuring various templates and processes to match Casella’s workflow requirements. Casella then created a number of company-wide and business-unit-specific models, including cash flow and rolling revenue forecasts, driver and expense models, and capital and balance sheet models.

“Unlike other software products that try to force you to do things a certain way, the Longview application gave us the flexibility to use whatever types of calculations we wanted and bring forward values from whatever accounting period we wanted,” Scherer explained.

The Results

With the Longview Performance Management application, Casella can now do an even better job of modeling their performance and business trends for both the revenue and expense sides of their business, and can easily perform a variety of “what if” scenarios to see how to take advantage of those trends. This has made it easier for Casella to roll things up so they can quickly get a sense of where they are and what changes need to be made, which has significantly shortened their budgeting and forecasting cycle. As a result, Casella users—roughly 130 accounting staff and business unit general managers—can now spend more time thinking about where the numbers are coming from and how to improve their business, rather than struggling with the mechanics of finding and entering the numbers in order to manage all their previous spreadsheets.

“The Longview application also includes a great reporting package that makes it easy for us to drill down into the details of our budgets to see what’s happening on an account-level basis and to identify any problem areas,” said Scherer.

"Unlike other software products that try to force you to do things a certain way, the Longview application gave us the flexibility to use whatever types of calculations we wanted.”

Chris Scherer Director of Forecasting, Budgeting, and Operations Support

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