The group
Industry: Automotive
Turnover: 35 million € (2019)
Employees: 150
Year of foundation: 1957
 Headquarters: Via Chiari, 36, 25033 Cologne (BS)
 Foreign offices: Taiwan, India
 Partnerships: USA, Brazil

Coram Europe Srl is an ideal partner company for manufacturers of industrial vehicles, agricultural machinery, earthmoving equipment, goods handling equipment and special machines, thanks to more than 60 years of experience.

The company has manufacturing plants in Italy, Taiwan, India, and also operates in North America and Brazil

The challenges

The company felt strongly that it needed to keep an eye on its cash position and prevent possible non-performing loans. It wanted to be able to run simulations of different forecast scenarios, acting on economic, capital or financial variables.

The budget process was previously developed on Excel, and involved significant manual management work. It was also impossible to carry out simulations and forecasting scenarios during the year.

The objectives pursued were thus:

  • Activate an integrated economic and financial planning process that would “talk” to SAP in an integrated manner, automating onerous calculation processes
  • Shift the focus from data preparation to data control, eliminating the use of Excel spreadsheets
  • Safeguard investments already made in the development of the Business Intelligence platform, based on SAP Business Objects and a Data Warehouse powered by SAP

The solution

The implemented process cascades through all the company’s departmental budgets: sales, production, purchasing, personnel and cost centers. It is also able to plan and control financing and investments, and to plan and control collections, payments and inventories.

Each stage is preparatory and integrated into the compilation of the next, up to and including the preparation of the budget complete with Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement.

The diagram below illustrates the steps in the planning process and the automatic interactions between different budgets.

The benefits obtained

  • Saves time in budget drafting, but especially in final control: the process is fully automated
  • Complete integration between applications
  • Quality assurance and uniqueness of data
  • Each application has been integrated into an overall architecture that makes the most of its features
  • Through the presence of the Data Warehouse, it was possible to realize bidirectional exchanges between the various applications: for example, the sales budget and cost centers obtained in the planning solution automatically feed SAP
  • Data processed by the planning solution are used by the BI platform for timely monitoring
  • Ease of reference, possibility of simulations and full control of Corporate KPIs

“Regesta LAB has developed an integrated and very efficient tool that, starting from the sales budget, uses the costs of products (internal and external) managed in SAP and au-tomatically calculates all direct costs. Through the available masks, we then go on to enter all other noncharacteristic and overhead costs. Once the budget is confirmed, the system detects the final figures from SAP and compares them, reporting all deviations.”

Angelo Piantoni, CEO – Coram Europe Srl