“The value that E78 Partners provides is huge.”
Cammie Muller – Chief Financial Officer of Aurora Organic Dairy
The Problem
Cammie Muller, the Chief Financial Officer at Aurora Organic Dairy, remembers when the company didn’t
have a solution for managing their financial data’s reporting and analytics.
“Our idea was to add an analyst who could build the reporting infrastructure and take on
the analytics that the controller and I were juggling between the two of us.” said Cammie.
However, due to the complex nature of the company’s reporting needs, Aurora struggled to find candidates who had all the necessary skill sets.
“Being able to obtain more information and put it in a format from which people can easily make decisions is critically important to us,” said Cammie. “We needed someone who had several different skillsets, who could be a data architect and design all the tables and the back-office architecture. We needed someone who could be analytical while building the front end in a user-friendly, easy-to-use way.”
The Solution
Aurora wondered if it was possible to achieve a solution that could handle in-depth reports without hiring an entire team. That’s when the company heard about E78 Partners.
“E78 Partners has multiple people who come in at various project stages, and they have all those little pieces of expertise we need,” said Cammie. “Had we hired just one person, we wouldn’t have gotten the same breadth of skills and expertise.” E78 Partners worked with Aurora’s accounting and IT teams to design and build reports from the ground up in Microsoft Power BI.
The first project involved building a margin reporting tool in Power BI that previously had been assembled once a year in Excel. In the second phase, E78 Partners will build out monthly management reporting for the leadership team, which will replace a manual Excel reporting process. Having reporting functionality like this allows Aurora to more efficiently manage resources.
“Thanks to the margin tool, we can better understand relative product profitability,” said Cammie. “We have all that information at our fingertips once we close our sales and billing for the month. This allows the sales team to look at trends, do forecasting, and price out products smarter.”
The Results
Aurora achieves accurate and in-depth reporting and analysis thanks to E78 Partners FP&A and Technology Teams, including:
- Big Company Quality Data
- Elimination of the need for expensive senior-level talent
- Efficient Management of Resources and Capabilites
- Current State Assessment of existing data environment and overall Finance Function.
- Creation of multidimensional margin analysis with fully integrated back-end.
- Development of enterprisewide, three-statement integrated, driver-based financial model with a fully integrated back-end.
