Capstone Logistics is a leading North American supply-chain solutions partner that helps ensure the nation has access to food, medical supplies, and consumer packaged goods. The company’s end-to-end offerings range from warehouse services, freight brokerage, last-mile delivery, and distribution management to supply-chain analytics and optimization.
As multistate supply chains continue to grow in complexity, Capstone found that its manual budgeting processes were no longer effective. Business owners spent too much time entering data from different systems into shared spreadsheets, and compiling the data was a time-consuming task. To help improve agility, they also needed insight into live financial data as well as the ability to create their own reports. After evaluating solutions that could help overcome all these challenges, Capstone chose Workday Adaptive Planning.
Soon after it deployed Workday Adaptive Planning, Capstone acquired several companies, which amplified the existing challenges and created new ones. However, Capstone quickly learned that the single source of truth it gains with Workday Adaptive Planning helps corporate-wide teams overcome challenges including merger acceleration and financial staff’s requirements for self-service reporting and automated workflows.
We’ve dramatically improved our agility with Workday Adaptive Planning. Today, budget planners can see how regions are rolling up and what gaps are emerging in real time, so that they can quickly make the changes needed to achieve their objectives.
Vice President of Finance
Challenges.
Five corporate acquisitions at one time.
To speed the mergers, financial staff needed real-time insights into consolidated data across existing and new business units, and they had to be able to compare pre-acquisition and post-acquisition numbers.
Complex, dynamic supply-chain requirements.
Data silos and manual reporting processes made it difficult to identify how changes in requirements mapped back to budget plans involving 16,000 employees, 60,000 carrier partnerships, and more than 550 sites.
Restricted budget insights and efficiency.
Because business owners managed budgets with spreadsheets, they spent valuable time entering data, checking facts, managing their master chart of accounts, consolidating financial statements for audits, and developing collaborative financial models. They also had to frequently ask IT teams for help creating reports and changing how systems categorized details such as industries, department hierarchies, and partner rollups.
Results.
Streamlined mergers and acquisitions.
The enterprise now has a single source of live, consolidated data in Workday Adaptive Planning. Staff use it to create and manage multistate budgets, measure ROI by comparing price to earnings, pull together shared financial statements for audits, see pre- and post-acquisition financials, and use pro forma views to explore hypothetical scenarios.
Improved agility and service levels.
Automated, self-service reporting tools in Workday Adaptive Planning give all departments on-demand, real-time insights across all regions. This makes it possible to quickly pinpoint and visualize changes and gaps in resources, operational costs, and margins, so that teams can immediately pivot to meet business objectives.
Greater efficiency and budget reports in half the time.
Business owners create their monthly reporting packages 50 percent faster than they could before they used Workday Adaptive Planning. And having the ability to create their own reports and define their own hierarchies, industries, and partner rollups means that they have instant access to the data they require to provide strategic insights and improve collaboration.