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Workflow Engine and Audit Trail Accelerate Wca's Budgeting Cycle
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Industries
- Recycling & Waste Management
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Replenishment
- Process Control & Optimization
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
WCA, a large U.S. waste management company, faced significant challenges in their budgeting process. The Finance team received budget templates in various formats and styles, requiring manual alterations before consolidation. Management lacked insight into users' workflow status without exchanging emails and phone calls. Additionally, a great deal of manual, time-consuming work was necessary to keep ledgers balanced across the organization's companies. Completing true budget to actuals reporting was difficult because the budget resided outside of WCA's reporting system.
About The Customer
WCA is a large waste management company based in the United States. The company deals with the collection, transportation, processing, and disposal of waste materials. With a significant number of employees and multiple companies under its umbrella, WCA handles a vast amount of data and transactions daily. The Finance team at WCA was responsible for creating, distributing, collecting, and consolidating hundreds of Excel templates for budgeting purposes. This process was highly manual and time-consuming, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors. WCA needed a solution to streamline their budgeting process, improve data accuracy, and provide better visibility into user activities.
The Solution
Vena provided a comprehensive solution to WCA's budgeting challenges. Vena's ETL processes pull data from WCA's general ledgers on a regular basis and store it in a central, secure data repository. This central repository ensures that the most up-to-date data is available for budgeting purposes. Vena enables managers to design centrally managed budget templates in Excel that contributors and reviewers can access online. Every 'save' to the template automatically commits inputted data to the central repository, eliminating the need for manual data collection and consolidation. The workflow engine allows management to assign specific tasks to contributors, reviewers, and approvers, and quickly filter through templates to view their owner, due date, and workflow status. The audit trail feature date-, time-, and user-stamps every change made to a spreadsheet, providing a clear record of all modifications. Vena also makes it easy for the Finance team to identify intracompany transactions by recording data about expenses and revenues in a template that is eventually mapped to an expense or revenue account in another company's ledger.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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