Gabrielle Gutierrez, the SVP at First Eagle Investment Management (FEIM), came from a large firm that had the resources to devote people and money to creating and using a complex budgeting solution. She is impressed that at a small firm like FEIM can have an accessible, user-friendly solution that lets nonfinance people be part of the budgeting process and therefore have a greater impact in the performance of the company. Users simply log in to a web portal and enter their budgets. They don’t even need to use Excel. (Excel is only used by the designers of the system.)
Forecasting/modeling was a very manual process for the FEIM accounting team, with most of the effort being spent on extracting data from various systems. The team purchased BI360 to optimize their current SAP Business One investment and be able to automate the data extraction and use it for designing models with Excel. With BI360 and SAP Business One, models get created via a web browser, and they can change drivers and assumptions and create, save, and compare countless scenarios to facilitate informed analysis and decision-making. Through the year, forecasts can be updated continuously with updated actual results and according to changing conditions.
BI360 helped FEIM create easy-to-use and robust budget templates to enter information and then use it in SAP Business One. BI360 fully integrates with SAP Business One and acts as an extension of each system.
FEIM realizes that there is much more to what BI360 can do for them and is planning on rolling out financial reports once the SAP upgrade is complete. Gabrielle used to have a bottom-up approach and now has a top-down approach, which the team prefers and now utilizes with BI360. BI360 is helping a “very small firm” like FEIM do world-class analysis and decision-making. Further, the organization is adding more users on a regular basis.
