German Event Supplier Finds Transformative Reporting and Significant Savings With Jet

Headquartered in Germany, Party Rent Group is a Europe-wide event supplier operating in nine countries with 24 branches and approximately 950 employees. As a full-service event coordination and rental operation, Party Rent Group hosts a diverse range of functions across Europe that vary in size and complexity, from intimate receptions to full scale trade shows.

A Tale of Copy/Pasting Growing Pains

Party Rent Group enjoyed success and significant growth through the 2000s and 2010s. As time progressed, that growth had vastly outpaced their ability to scale or meet the volume of demand from their customers. The problem centered around the fact that their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software wasn’t geared toward reporting against a rental business model. To make the ERP work, employees resorted to a tedious manual process of copy/pasting reports together, a practice that was time consuming and error prone.

Frank Rabe, logistics manager, at Party Rent Group’s Berlin location, put it simply, “it was a very hard copy and paste job.” But that simple description underscores the depth of the problem. This copy/paste problem extended throughout the entire company, from management reporting and financial analysis, all the way down to daily operations in the warehouse and order fulfillment. “We had a big ERP system, but the ERP did not deliver the data we needed. We had to copy everything manually. We had a few people and a huge amount of paperwork,” said Rabe.

Producing monthly financial reports for the leadership team was a monumental task. At the time, the company had a highly experienced controller that committed one week of every month to assembling financial reports by copy/pasting data into spreadsheets. It was a waste to utilize that person’s skill and experience on such a menial task. Eventually that person left the company out of frustration.

Looking for a way to alleviate the strain, Rabe sought help from a business consultant. That service came with a big price tag and it ultimately arrived at the same data roadblock. The consultancy needed a lot of data in order to improve the internal processes that they were hired to fix. According to Rabe, “there was a lot of manual paperwork. There were a lot of orders. In the end, the consultancy determined that we could improve the business through better data management.” The consultancy suggested they take a look at Jet Analytics.

Jet Analytics Hosts a Goodbye Party for Paperwork

The operation was nearing a breaking point–tuck in a cycle of manual, paper processes that couldn’t keep up with the volume of orders. There were times when work in the warehouses halted to a standstill because paper inventory sheets could not be generated fast enough.

It was at this point that Party Rent Group connected with insightsoftware partner datenkultur to help reduce their paperwork load and modernize their processes. Andreas Koblischke, CEO at datenkultur, oversaw the process of integrating data from their ERP to the Jet Analytics data model. But there was one problem: the ERP system was in Dutch and every table in the ERP could only contain a maximum of eight characters. Essentially, the ERP system was a huge application that used complex abbreviations in a foreign language.

datenkultur supervised the task of translating every table, line by line, while developing specialized Power BI dashboards based on the Jet Analytics data warehouse. The results of the implementation were transformative. “It was the first time that they got their data in the perfect form. This was never a possibility before,” said Koblischke. He went onto say, “they didn’t hire new people, they used their existing staff in a totally different way. It was much more efficient, it saved a lot of money, a lot of time, and it solved a lot of problems.”

In total, Party Rent Group experienced savings of more than €200K per year in their Berlin location alone, by implementing Jet. By automating manual processes and eliminating the physical paperwork from their business model, they eliminated the need to schedule overtime staff and hire outside contractors to fulfill the copy/paste workload.

Positive changes were felt throughout the company. Employees found new motivation because they disliked the old manual process and now they got to use modern tools like iPads throughout the course of their workday. On the warehouse floor, Rabe said, “the data eliminated a lot of problems, improved communication, eliminated the copy/paste errors.”

The timing of the integration also proved to be very fortuitous. Since the transition was completed before the pandemic, the management team was able to work remotely while a small team of staff members in the warehouse maintained operations. This would not have been possible without Jet Analytics, and the business would have been forced to shut down entirely with the old system.

Celebrating the Success of a Party Planning Enterprise

Party Rent Group witnessed a transformational streamlining of operational workflows, newfound clarity in management reporting, and significant cost savings thanks to Jet Analytics.

• Cost Savings. More than €200K per year on consultant fees and employee overtime.
• Time Savings. Report assembly reduced from week-long task to instant, on-demand execution.
• Enhanced management reporting offered new level of insight into business performance.
• Automated operational reports maintained day-to-day warehouse operations through Covid crisis.