Case Studies > Workflow Engine and Audit Trail Accelerate Wca's Budgeting Cycle

Workflow Engine and Audit Trail Accelerate Wca's Budgeting Cycle

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Vena
Microsoft Excel

Tech Stack

ETL Processes
Central Data Repository
Workflow Engine
Audit Trail

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Recycling & Waste Management

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Replenishment
Process Control & Optimization
Remote Asset Management

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

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 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.

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

Automatic storage of saved data takes the manual work out of data collection and consolidation, reducing the number of emails being sent across the organization.
The central database provides the organization with a 'single version of the truth' and keeps WCA's data secure, accessible, and up-to-date.
The workflow engine keeps everyone on the same page and eliminates the need for managers and reviewers to track user activity through inefficient email exchanges and phone calls.
The audit trail makes it easy for managers to roll back to previous budget versions to view and analyze changes over time.
Automatic mapping between ledgers ensures that ledgers are balanced across the organization, reducing the risk of errors.

Quantitative Benefit

Reduced the number of emails being sent across the organization by 50%.
Decreased the time spent on manual data collection and consolidation by 40%.
Improved data accuracy by 30% due to the elimination of manual adjustments.
Increased visibility into user activities by 25% through the use of the workflow engine.