CASE STUDIES AND EXAMPLES

Below are examples or case studies showing how JAAD Group improved or automated tasks and the underlying benefits.

Build Interactive Budgeting Tool
Accuracy Improvement by 66%

Issue: A management company responsible for a consolidated accounting department for 30 companies required an interactive budgeting tool.  The company wanted to use Excel for the process with security enabled at all levels throughout the process.

Solution: JAAD Group created an Excel “Budget Creation Template” that allowed the Budget Administrator to create workbooks for each company/department. Each workbook contained:

  • Security levels to prevent unauthorized access.
  • Programming via VBA so that when approved, all data sheets would “roll-up” to a master sheet, allowing management to “lock” the data from further changes.
  • Included payroll processing, tax rate changes, and benefits changes to be completed interactively via individually secure and separate workbooks.
  • Ability to update individual budget templates with current budget/reforecast data at will.
  • Ability to load data into Company’s accounting software seamlessly.

Success story: With this program, the manual data entry system was replaced with an automatic system that increased budgeting accuracy 66% and increased the speed at which changes were implemented by over 1000% and allowed continuous reforecasting.

Improve Operations Financial Reporting Efficiency with Automation
Saved 40 Person Hours / Month

Problem: A Company had outdated Operations Reports that were used as financial statements for internal management and sent to their funding institution.  The report could only be updated manually, with each change taking hours, sometimes even up to three days to complete and verify.  The Company wanted a push button solution where report changes could be made on the fly and the data transfer from the Company’s database would happen “behind the scenes.”  The existing report was in Excel and the company wanted to keep the report in that format.

Solution: After analyzing all of the data sources, JAAD Group created a database to combine “like” accounts into a table that were then assigned a unique code.  We created an Excel “Ops Report Program” that allowed push button creation and loading of data into either an existing report where only adjustments needed to be made or into a new report.  The program harnessed over 50 data sources and combined them into one document within 5 minutes.  The “Program” also:

  • Allowed the user to examine all data sources to determine if they had been properly updated before creating the Operations Report. This allowed for a more focused analysis of the raw data and reduced the need to rerun reports.
  • Allowed the user to select one, several, or all companies and import the selected data. This allowed more efficiency to only update/create the reports needed.
  • The user was able to create individual drafts of reports.  Multiple drafts allowed management the ability to compare data for updated accuracy.

Success story: The previous manual procedure took up to 8 hours to complete a format change.  The new process allowed on-the-fly changes to be made and implemented within minutes.  The man hours saved in converting the manual process to an automated one are at least 40 hours each month.

Data Entry Search Improvement
From 9 Minutes to 30 Seconds

Poor Design: A Company created an Excel document that had only 1200 rows of data.  Because of poor design issues, every time a user wanted to try and find a specific record – it would take up to 9 minutes. This was due to array formulas being used and poor back end programming.  The company needed a faster way to analyze and find the data they required.

Solution: After analyzing the workbook layout, VBA coding, and formula use, JAAD Group changed the data structure to use Excel’s built in “table” features and then included pivot tables with data slicers to give a graphical representation of the data.  The back end VBA code was removed as it was no longer needed and the large number of array formulas were removed.

Success story: To find a data record, the previous design took a user about 9 minutes to find.  After the redesigned data structure was created along with using Excel’s excellent data analyzing features, this was dropped to only 30 seconds.  That is a process improvement of 1700%.

How can JAAD Group help your business?