Big Dutchman AG
Replacing well-trodden paths in reporting with digital data highways was the declared strategic goal of Big Dutchman.
As a result, the manufacturer of feeding systems and livestock housing equipment took a close look at the Excel-based system that had evolved over the years within Corporate Controlling. In addition to speeding up and automating data processing through Board, the efficient calculation of the highly complex allocation method has helped ensure that Corporate Controlling now has more time to analyze data and serve as a strategic partner to management.
The Company: State-of-the-art animal husbandry
Big Dutchman develops and sells feeding systems and livestock housing equipment for modern pig and poultry farming. The company employs approximately 3,400 people worldwide and, as the industry leader, operates in more than 100 countries.
With its practical and forward-looking solutions, Big Dutchman is a leader in innovation and is now regarded as a pioneer in the field of animal-friendly housing systems for laying hens in cage, free-range, and organic systems. The company is headquartered in Calveslage, a district of Vechta in Lower Saxony.
The facts at a glance:
✓ Automated and faster data preparation process
✓ Greater depth of information (single point of truth)
✓ Reduced data preparation effort
✓ More agile management in corporate controlling
✓ Detailed data views and data analyses
The Challenge: A Digital Transformation Initiative in Controlling
As an industry leader in innovation, with over 700 patent and utility model applications to date, the volume of data from the 59 legal entities linked to Corporate Controlling has grown in tandem with the company’s expansion. In response to the company’s positive development, the head of Corporate Controlling, Jürgen Spille, formulated the strategic goal of driving a digitalization initiative to transform the long-established, well-trodden paths of Excel into high-speed processing and reporting highways.
“Our goal was to automate controlling processes in order to free up more resources for data analysis,” says Benjamin Gryschka, IT project manager in Corporate Controlling at Big Dutchman. “From our perspective, this was first and foremost a technical issue. The requirement was therefore to implement standard reporting and the associated data processing entirely within a unified business intelligence tool . In addition, the solution was intended to provide BI-supported planning functionalities in the future,” explains Benjamin Gryschka.
The first projects identified were cost center reporting and cross-client sales reporting. “With regard to cost center reporting, we faced the challenge that our existing Excel solution had reached its limits in terms of processing power and complexity. The manual and coordination effort increased as the level of detail in Excel grew,” says Kristin Kathmann, Cost Center Accounting Manager in Corporate Controlling at Big Dutchman. “The situation was similar with sales reporting, whose detailed analyses were no longer up to date,” explains Kristin Kathmann.
The solution: A single source of truth
Based on strategic goals and operational and controlling-specific needs, a list of requirements was formulated and compared with the tools available on the software market. During the evaluation phase, BI experts from celver AG were consulted, and the decision was ultimately made to implement Board as a unified BI platform. “Metaphorically speaking, Board was the Swiss Army knife we had been looking for: a flexible yet unified platform for business intelligence, reporting, and planning—and thus a reliable single point of truth for our company,” says Benjamin Gryschka. “A number of functionalities also played a significant role in our decision, including workflow management, the various drill-down functions, and the extensive authorization options,” adds Kristin Kathmann.
Based on a detailed requirements specification with design guidelines and the goal of implementing new requirements in an agile manner throughout the project, the cost center reporting system was built in Board using celver. A key priority was to efficiently map the cost center allocation process in Board and to utilize modern visualizations, such as treemaps and waterfall charts, in the reporting. “We load a wide variety of data from Excel or the data warehouse—whether transaction data or master data—into Board, check for consistency and compliance, harmonize the data, and calculate allocation keys—the entire data preparation process for calculating the cost center allocation method is highly complex. Together with celver, we have succeeded in implementing the underlying logic in Board and further optimizing it, so that the data is now calculated based on the client structure through multi-level allocation methods to a matrix organization by region and business unit,” explains Benjamin Gryschka.
In addition to cost center reporting, a cross-client sales reporting system was implemented. Using Board, this system offers modern and user-friendly analytical functions that provide detailed insights into the effectiveness of the sales organization. Since the go-live, approximately 65 users have been working with the system at the management level in countries including Germany, Malaysia, the United States, Brazil, China, and Russia.
“Board has been well received, and requests to use Board are proactively brought to our attention in Corporate Controlling,” says Benjamin Gryschka. “In the next step, we want to expand our standard reporting to include additional metrics and analyses,” says Benjamin Gryschka.
Board has significantly reduced the amount of manual data preparation required and enabled the reporting process to be almost fully automated—from data loading and calculation to workflow management. As a result, Big Dutchman’s Corporate Controlling team now has much more time to review results and manage initiatives. “All figures are now up to date and presented in meaningful visualizations,” explains Kristin Kathmann.
Benjamin Gryschka adds: “The entire data processing and calculation process has become much faster, simpler, and more transparent in terms of cross-functional collaboration. The planned data highway for cost center and sales reporting is running smoothly. As a result, we have regained a much higher degree of agility and flexibility in our operational controlling activities—we can focus on data analysis and formulating measures, can easily create new reports ourselves based on a unified data foundation, and have regained time for the strategic development of controlling.”
“This new agility in Big Dutchman’s controlling function was already evident during the project implementation. ‘Complex requirements, such as calculating the cost allocation method for the matrix organization, were implemented quickly and reliably, and—thanks to the flexibility of the Board solution and celver’s support—could be mapped exactly as we had envisioned,’ explains Benjamin Gryschka. “In this process, celver AG was the perfect sparring partner and source of ideas for us in developing innovative solutions in Board,” says Benjamin Gryschka.
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