Ford & Slater

About the company

Ford & Slater is one of the largest DAF Trucks dealership groups in the UK.
The company operates from 12 dealerships strategically located across the East Midlands and East Anglia.

Ford & Slater was founded in 1928 and since then it has been at the forefront of commercial vehicle distribution. In recent years they have won the prestigious “Motor Dealer of the Year” award and in 2007 the Spalding branch moved into a purpose built dealership.

The Company mission statement is to exceed customer’s expectations by offering high-quality transport services in an ethical manner at competitive prices.
They achieve this by effectively utilising the synergies within their dealership group, offering innovative solutions including a “one-stop shop” provided by highly motivated, skilled, long-term employees and reinvesting profits to provide modern, safe premises.

Challenges

Producing monthly management reporting and consolidating numbers across the 12 dealerships was extremely difficult and time-consuming. Da-ta had to be pulled together from a myriad of spreadsheets, which reflected the diverse nature of the departmental structure found at Ford & Slater and common across the automotive industry.

When it came to budgeting and forecasting this large number of spreadsheets made it almost impossible to create any more than one budget; making changes to the model from a top down perspective was out of the question.

The challenge was to implement a solution which would streamline the process and dramatically reduce the time to produce management reporting and budgeting with ability to move to monthly re-forecasting.

The Result

Create a Jedox model which reflects the business structure of the organisation. One cube was required for each department and the resulting P&L by department is then “pulled” into a group P&L cube.

An additional requirement to adjust the actual data after it has been uploaded into the cubes. The use of the multi-dimensionality allows the easy creation of both an adjustments version and an adjusted actual version. This provides both for journal entry and a final result without affecting the actuals.

Within the same cubes Budget and forecasting versions can be created. Departmental cube budgets can be set for every account at the total dealership level and these values can be spread based on last year’s actuals. This will be extended to forecasting.

It only took Andrew Vickerstaff, Group Financial Controller around 2/3 weeks to produce his annual budget report.
Whereas they really struggled to produce their budget and make amendments to it they can do as many top-down adjustments as they need.