Customer Cases - Finance

GAUSSSOFT PROFIT AND COST

CUSTOMER CASES - FINANCE

Customers+3.000
Assets: +$30 Million
Annual Revenue $20 Million
Profit and Cost and Business Intelligence tools: GaussSoft Profit and Cost & Radial Viewer
Professional Services Automation: GaussSoft Activity Report

http://www.fiduoccidente.com.co

Managing several investment funds with more than 3000 clients, 10 offices in several cities and more than US$30M in assets, FiduOccidente is a Trust, investment bank and Financial Services company belonging to the biggest financial group in Colombia (Grupo Aval).

Due to the diversity and complexity of the services provided, it was hard for this company to tell the good customers and products from the bad ones. In this company’s dynamic operation there is a brand new project every week and 60% of FiduOccidente costs and expenses come from specialized people working for specifics on these projects. The company needed to accurately link all these expenses to every product and customer to produce accurate and reliable information to help then make strategic decisions and improvements.

FiduOccidente decided to look for an Activity Based Management (ABM) solution that provides precise information on costs and profitability for each project and customer instead of just having company totals. The project was so strategic that the CEO headed up the project himself. Their RFP requested accurate and detailed cost and profit information and fast implementation times. Based on value and functional issues GaussSoft Profit line of products was selected from a list of 5 alternatives. Some of the key elements were the easiness of the activity (time) reporting system and the reallocation function.

The project produced immediate results. For instance, in one of their business lines they discovered that 4 out of 16 products were loosing money while the overall profitability of the area was positive. When they identified those deviations, the executive team decided to take some actions:

1. The efficiency of every process involved was analyzed and adjusted.

2. The structure of services fees was changed according to the detailed cost information provided by GaussSoft Profit.

3. When prices could not be adjusted FiduOccidente decided not to receive any more clients in these lines of products, but decided not to affect current clients.

4. FiduOccidente decided to promote only products they discovered highly profitable.

After 3 months of deployment of those strategies FiduOccidente had identified benefits in their lines higher than the cost of the whole project, and there were actions taken to capitalize that new information.

“We often have to participate in proposals for huge accounts.

Time is spent by people like salesmen, lawyers, even the CEO. With Gauss – Profit we can get the exact costs of making every proposal.”
Jorge Romero - ABC Consultant for FiduOccidente

Sufi www.sufi.com.co, a large financial leasing company belonging to the large financial group Bancolombia NYSE: CIB. Like other companies of the group, Sufi has used GaussSoft Profit and Cost for several years to determine the true costs of their products and services, supporting them make bottom line decisions and finally improving the company’s overall profitability.

“We’ve been using GaussSoft Profit and Cost for more than 10 years, and have been useful mainly to know the profitability of each of our products and to make decisions related to the point of decided to remove products because they are not generating the expected profit”. SEBASTIAN PALACIO, Costing Analyst

The Colombian financial found for project development FONADE implemented GaussSoft Profit and Cost in five months and achieved successful results during the operation. The cost model allows obtaining detailed profitability information for an approximate 10.000 contracts and includes an enhanced activity based cost allocation sequence– ABC.

FONADE, whom has defined as strategic objective to consolidate itself as a national profitable and competitive development agency, implemented the profit and cost system with the goal to do detailed analysis on profit components, including cost by specific activities for each single contract, with the main objective to support FONADE’s financial and operative management as well as the overall decision making process.

Being able to track the profitability components at different levels with precision and efficiency was fundamental to FONADE, generating high operative and structural requirements for the cost system, including time reporting tools and advanced business intelligence tools for advanced analytics, and flexible reports and dashboards.