Founded on the concept of an award-winning water treatment technology by a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gradiant is a leading provider of water treatment technologies and solutions focused on solving the world‘s most challenging water problems. Operating on seven continents with more than 350 employees, Gradiant works to enable industrial growth in harmony with nature and deliver solutions that help to make a positive impact on both the economy and the environment.
Challenge
Rapid growth inspires changes
Gradiant‘s rapid growth added more entities in more countries, prolonging the budgeting and planning process. The process was becoming painfully slow. The finance team was spending too much time manually exporting data from multiple systems onto spreadsheets. Version control problems, siloed data, and difficulties with consolidation were growing. After initially considering an ERP system, their team decided a modern Enterprise Performance Management Solution would be better suited to their environment and better able to meet their scaling needs. Aiming to improve their heavily manual planning processes and insufficient audit and access management, their key requirements included seamless integration of multiple source systems and the ability to continue working with an Excel interface, which reduced the learning curve for their users.
Solution
A successful implementation
Gradiant considered Jedox and Vena Solutions, but selected Jedox for its adaptability, efficiency, and a single, unified solution for planning, reporting, dashboards and consolidation. Because they selected Jedox Cloud, Gradiant was able to complete a 100% cloud deployment using the company‘s own authentication and complete it with minimal support from IT, which meant there was no need to purchase hardware or set up local servers. Their Finance and Operations team was able to lead much of the implementation themselves via the web. With Jedox, the Gradiant team was able to implement a balance sheet model for planning, reporting and analysis, Excel planning templates for flexible and localized planning, a detailed cash flow model for improved analysis, and business logic for analysis and reporting including exchange rate simulation.
Outcome
An improved global process
Gradiant successfully implemented a more systematic structure to their budgeting cycle. Their data is cleaner, easier to access, and budgeting and planning have become much faster to process. They also achieved a single source of truth with a central repository for all of their data. With their customized cash flow model, their cash flow reporting can be easily analyzed across their processes and data doesn’t have to be manually processed in spreadsheets anymore. Additionally, with the unique structure of their organization, all their team members can be power users without restrictions and have self-service for data analysis and a holistic performance management view to be more autonomous in their daily tasks. Gradiant can now be forward-thinking to focus on further innovations in their industry. Gradiant’s future plans include expanding their use of Jedox into operations and other business units and then eventually the rest of the company‘s operations for truly extended planning and analysis.
