Synder's of Hanover, one of the top players in pretzel industry had to change the way financial data was collected and analyzed in the company due to unavailability of detailed view of the information collected from financial data.

Problem:

In the earlier process, the financial analyst had to collect excel spreadsheets from different department heads scattered worldwide and organise it in another excel spreadsheet. The final spreadsheet document acted as a defacto monthly Profit-Loss statement for the company. The situation became worse at the end of each fiscal quarter because the reports generated were of no use for generating year end PL statement. Any corrections would require the spreadsheets to be sent to the department and the analyst had to wait for the resubmission of the spreadsheets.The officials complained of not getting information available to them immediately in an efficient and detailed level.

Solution:

The company came up with an idea of discarding its paper based system and using proCube to collect and organise the data in a manageable way with more detail and the best part was that it still made use of excel spreadsheets so there was not much problem incorporating it in the company.

keeping this in mind, the following questions are answered:

1. What were the business advantages of using proCube software? Can you think of any other advantages that Synder's of Hanover might realize in future?

Ans. The business advantages from the the usage of the product are as follows:

i. The company had a cut in the labor costs involved in creating reports.

ii. The company was able to identify flop products that did not click in the market and did not generate enough sales compared to the popular ones.

The other advantages that Synders might realize in future is the ability of proCube to be integrated with a datawarehouse that can be used instead of excel spreadsheets to store data collected from different departments.

2. Other than finance and accounting, what other areas did the proCube software impact? Describe each one.

Ans. Apart from finance and accounting, the major areas where proCube had a huge impact were Production and Distribution.

Production:

The proCube software enables the company to keep track of the products being sold more and products that did not meet up. This information enables the executive head to decide upon as to how much quantity of a product has to produced. If customers are not buying a particular product the company can reduce the production of that product.

Distribution:

With the PL statements generated by the proCube software the company was able to get detailed information about the stores where certain products were sold more in comparison to other products. This enables the distribution of products to the stores in a appropriate manner so that the hit product gets distributed widely and sales can increase.

In the end i would like to conclude that since the pretzel consumers are increasing day by day and the snack industry as a whole continues to boom. Now the question arises that can a family owned organization like Synder's of Hanover compete against big corporate players such as Fritolay. Well, the company has taken a wise step of incorporating a business strategy through IT by making use of proCube and has been able to survive and compete in the market against players like Fritolay.

By:

Satchidanand Das

1MS07IS090