Tidemark Allows Ceva to Align Its Financial Predictions and Results with Strategic, Non-Financial Goals

The Client

Ceva Santé Animale is dedicated to maintaining and safeguarding the health of the world’s livestock and companion animals. A multinational firm headquartered in France, Ceva manufactures vaccines, topical medication, hygiene products, and other health and wellness items. The company conducts research into the best husbandry practices and environmental conservation.

Driven by several years of aggressive acquisition policies and dynamic organic growth, Ceva engaged insightsoftware to help it smoothly transition the acquired companies, optimize finances, forecast and track sales, and foster performance monitoring.

Business Challenges

Ceva’s rapid expansion often made it more and more difficult for its finance departments to collect and use data. In fact, before engaging insightsoftware, Ceva had only a standardized process for reporting and consolidation and was mainly using Excel as a support to short-term financial forecasting and budgeting. The level of excellence in managing the global performance of the company did require a state of the art Performance Management tool integrated from Operations to strategic planning. The implementation of Tidemark made it possible to reach this target and to integrate all business units and affiliates of Ceva worldwide in a global integrated financial forecasting and budgeting process.

The Tidemark EPM solution also made it possible to globally pilot the performance of the group with the right level of granularity for each organizational unit. Ceva needed logistical support to align its workflow and approval processes with business operations and management at all levels. Just as important, Ceva planned to maintain its aggressive acquisition policy; the finance and sales departments needed a system that could grow along with the firm. Scalability to incorporating additional key performance indicators and a fast-expanding customer and distribution network were key considerations.

The Goal

Companies in emerging and high-tech industries often accelerate growth by acquiring firms that possess complementary competencies and assets. Acquisitions allow growing firms to integrate vertically and/or horizontally, gaining access to new markets and customer bases, and achieving supply chain efficiencies. For an acquisition to work, it must capture inter-department synergies. Several hurdles must be overcome, notably disparities in culture, workflow, division of labor and responsibility, reporting methods, and success measures.

Enterprise performance management software takes the trial-and-error out of determining the best organizational structure. For maximizing expanded company’s capabilities, EPM can create several scenarios that will highlight potential bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and challenges, enabling management to institute controls or adjustments to optimize production, procurement, and other cost and revenue centers.

The Solution

Tidemark

In order to assimilate Ceva’s newly acquired companies, insightsoftware tailored its cloud-based planning platform to create enterprise-wide scenarios for testing possible business organization strategies. These are critical to Ceva’s ability to collect and examine granular sales data and forecast inputs in order to create profit and loss statements and profit margin reports at the operational level as well as 18-month rolling sales forecast. More importantly, Ceva uses the software to analyze current business operations and potentially create scenarios to measure the effect of contemplated strategy shifts. The reports can be tailored to segregate sales and profitability figures based on a variety of factors, such as geography, species, product line, etc.

This scalability, flexibility, and ability to handle an unlimited amount of data, dimensions, and metrics builds on the company’s business processes to encompass shared key performance indicators and, when desired, incorporate variables such as country/industry maturity and currency fluctuations to make analysis through Tidemark an intuitive process, ideal for global roll-out through all Ceva’s operational units in a common platform.

The Result

Tidemark allows Ceva to align its financial predictions and results with strategic, non-financial goals. Relying on the platform’s data reporting grids combined with BI technology, the company receives reliable and standardized information and structures its forecast cycles. Tying financial performance to enterprise-wide key performance indicators is especially important for a large multinational company like Ceva. Its various divisions, markets, and product lines add layers of complexity to its business model. Tidemark makes sense of it all, paving the way for consolidated global processes.