Blue Waters Products Ltd. Extend the Uses of Board for Company-Wide Budgeting, Planning and Decision-Making | Quisitive
Blue Waters Case Study Feature Image: Water bottles with the Blue Waters logo overlaid
Blue Waters Products Ltd. Extend the Uses of Board for Company-Wide Budgeting, Planning and Decision-Making
Caribbean-based manufacturer improves its financial forecasting, reporting, costing, production, and scenario planning with the help of Quisitive and the implementation of Board.
BlueWatersLogo

In this case study:

Client: Blue Waters Products Ltd. (BWPL)

 

Industry: Manufacturing

 

Products and Services:

Location: Caribbean

“Since Quisitive is our strategic partner, we
relied on their judgment, and we are glad that
we chose Board as it met all our criteria. The
team at Quisitive is reliable, always available,
and solution-focused with great problem-solving
skills.”
Pradeep Subrian
Chief Executive Officer, BWPL

Overview

As a leader in beverage manufacturing & distribution in the Caribbean, Blue Waters Products Ltd. needed to evolve its financial planning, forecasting & reporting process to support further growth. Initially choosing the Board decision-making platform to replace Excel-based budgeting and reporting processes, Blue Waters Products Ltd. has since worked with premier Board Partner, Quisitive, to expand the use of the solution into scenario planning and projections, sales, costing & procurement, production planning, foreign exchange management, and cash flow management. Board is now being used by executives, department managers, budget contributors, sale managers, and finance for unified planning and monthly reporting and has transformed the company’s approach to planning & decision-making.

The Company

Established in 1999, Blue Waters Products Ltd. (BWPL) is one of the largest producers and distributors of beverage products in the Caribbean, manufacturing, and selling over 400 products, including the preferred brand of purified bottled water. Headquartered in Trinidad & Tobago, the company started with a dream and with just 12 employees.

 

Today, Blue Waters Products operates a world-class facility in Orange Grove with over 500 employees helping to serve over 20,000 customers. Named one of Trinidad and Tobago’s Best Managed Companies in 2019 by Deloitte, the company’s impressive growth and innovative business management practices have set the standard for beverage and distribution success in the Caribbean. 

The Initial Challenge: Manual Planning and Siloed Data

When BWPL found itself in a period of fast growth, the finance and leadership teams realized that their existing budgeting, forecasting, and reporting methods in Excel were not sufficient. 

 

At that time, most of the company’s sales, production, and financial data were kept in heavily formatted spreadsheets, which often led to lengthy delays in running quarterly reports or data queries and an immense amount of time spent consolidating versions of workbooks and distributing information. The process also did not allow for easy analysis or drill-down into critical transactional data. In addition, departmental data was heavily siloed. Sales volume budget and forecast numbers did not match what was used in production planning, and purchase orders were not considered in cash flow projections. This siloed approach limited the company’s visibility into key metrics and the accuracy of forecasts. The leadership team knew that the days of solely spreadsheet-based planning were behind them. They needed financial management and a decision-making platform to support growth and provide decision-makers with faster, better information. 

 

“Our company has always retained a strong focus on continuous improvement through IT-driven systems,” said Manzur Mohammed, Head of Finance at BWPL. “We knew if we invested in a solution to optimize our planning and analysis, it would lend efficiencies and value that would propel our company into the future.” 

“Having worked together before, Quisitive had a great understanding of our business and the industry, and we knew they would deliver this project on time, on budget, and beyond expectations.”
Pradeep Subrian
Chief Executive Officer, BWPL

The Solution: Unified Planning & Reporting

Having worked with Quisitive in the past to implement other key business systems like Microsoft Dynamics for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, and emPerform for employee performance management, BWPL knew the team could assist in finding and launching a new financial management solution. Manzur Mohammed, Head of Finance at BWPL, had a particular set of solution criteria in mind and tasked Quisitive with finding a solution that could deliver. 

Solution Criteria:

  • Easy financial and management reporting and dashboard 
  • Seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics ERP 
  • Ability to accommodate complicated budget calculations involving SKU and customer channels and personnel expenses 
  • Audit trail capabilities with versioning 
  • Automated workflow with approvals 
  • Security and flexibility 

After analyzing the company’s needs, Quisitive recommended the Board decision-making platform. 

 

“Since Quisitive is our strategic partner, we relied on their judgment, and we are glad that we chose Board as it met all our criteria. The team at Quisitive is reliable, always available, and solution-focused with great problem-solving skills," said Subrian, CEO, BWPL.

 

Being a premier Board Partner and having implemented the solution at other similar companies, Quisitive knew that to ensure a successful launch of Board, they would have to undertake a phased approach involving several departments and teams. 

 

“We split the implementation of Board into key stages that would allow us to review, evaluate, and plan much better,” said Quang Dinh, Lead Solution Designer at Quisitive. “We worked closely with different functional areas of Blue Waters Products to plan and execute critical short-term milestones while simultaneously ensuring a smooth launch and integration of other Board modules and tools.” 

“Quisitive worked with us to develop a solution roadmap to make sure we get the most use of Board, not only for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, but also on other areas of our business, like procurement and production planning, foreign exchange management, and cash management. We have extended the use of Board as much as possible throughout our organization.”
Manzur Mohammed
Head of Finance, BWPL

“Knowing BWPL’s vision and growth plans, Quisitive worked with us to implement models to serve our immediate needs best as well as assisting us to introduce new models to meet our long-term goals,” said Manzur. “We started with the cost center costing and budget models. After finishing that, we extended to the sales budgeting model, which feeds data into the cost budgeting model to provide full Income Statement reports. 

 

Next, we implemented the sales reports and dashboard model, pulling data from multiple operational systems of ours. Then we included trade asset reports and analysis to help us make the best use of our marketing dollars. Finally, we implemented a full-scale production and procurement planning using budgeted volume sale, bills of materials, and real–time purchase orders to plan our production and inventory.” 

Results

Integrated & Timely Business Decision Making

Using Board, BWPL has been able to experience the many benefits of automated data management & approvals, integrated planning, and real-time stakeholder reporting. 

Significant Time Savings

“Board has helped cut the processing times of our budgeting and forecasting cycles significantly,” said Manzur. “Instead of doing quarterly forecasting, we are now forecasting monthly, all the way from revenues, production, procurement, operating costs, and personnel expenses. Board users can work on their forecast, review their monthly and quarterly expenses, and review their sales, all in one platform anytime as they wish.” 

Monthly Forecasts & Scenario Analysis

“The biggest benefits that we have experienced using Board is being able to forecast monthly and conduct effective scenario analysis,” continued Manzur. “This was not possible before using spreadsheets and has helped us to make sound and timely production, procurement, and financial decisions.”

Multi-faced Reporting

“The dimensionality concept of data stored in Board and the ease of adding groupings, attributes, and hierarchies are significant benefits for us,” said Manzur. “We can slice and dice and review our data from different angles very easily, giving us a multi-faceted view of our business that would only be possible with a solution like Board.” 

User Dashboards

“Using Board and the Board Report Central framework developed by Quisitive, our super-users can quickly and easily create their own reports and dashboards for analysis,” said Manzur. “This has resulted in trend analysis and insight that helps our leaders and Board of Directors make better decisions.”

Flexibility & Scalability

“Board’s flexibility and scalability are key and are why we have been able to get a phenomenal return on our IT investment,” continued Manzur. “There is simply no other application that offers the flexibility, feature-set, and usability that Board has delivered.” 

 

“Board has helped us to transform how we approach budgeting & business planning. Quisitive helped us tap into the full potential of this powerful solution, and Board is now our company-wide decision-making platform,” continued Manzur. 

The Future of Board at BWPL

Quisitive continues to work with BWPL to extend the Board platform even further by enhancing existing models and creating new models that will track select initiatives and non-financial metrics, including: 

  • Using Board to create a customer ROI analysis model to evaluate returns at the marketing spend and customer levels.
  • Enhancing the sale budgeting process with integrations that will allow for the automated insertion of values and allow for planning & insights at the product SKU level. 

“Board has helped us to transform how we approach budgeting & business planning. Quisitive helped us tap into the full potential of this powerful solution, and Board is now our company-wide decision-making platform," said Manzur Mohammed, Head of Finance, BWPL.

TORONTO, Nov. 06, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Quisitive Technology Solutions, Inc. (“Quisitive” or the “Company”) (TSXV: QUIS, OTCQX: QUISF), a premier Microsoft Solutions Provider and Payments Solutions Provider, today announced that it was named the 2023 Solution Partner of the Year by Board International (“Board”) at the Board Americas Partner Summit. The Company was recognized among a field of Board partner organizations for its outstanding channel marketing collaboration and introduction of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Trial Balance Extractor solution to Board.

The award was announced at the Board Americas Partner Summit 2023 in San Jose, California. The summit gathered prominent Board partners from across North and South America to feature vision-casting keynotes, unveil new product announcements, host engaging solution sessions, and facilitate networking opportunities. Quisitive’s Industry Solutions leader Syed Fahad was featured as a panelist at the event in a session titled ‘The Evolution of EPM, AI and Finance.’

The award represents Quisitive’s commitment to its long-term partnership with Board. Quisitive has been a premier Board partner for over ten years, and in 2023, Quisitive introduced Board to Dynamics 365 Trial Balance Extractor, a solution that bridges the gap between the general ledger data captured in Dynamics 365 and Board’s intelligent planning platform. This integration helps enhance the financial planning and analysis (“FP&A”) capabilities of enterprises that leverage and rely on Microsoft ERP technologies. Additionally, the Company has collaborated on channel marketing initiatives aimed at driving sales growth and expanding market reach.

“Quisitive’s recognition as the Solution Partner of the Year is well deserved with their ongoing commitment to Board and Microsoft, driving innovation in financial and operational excellence with Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications. Their new trial balance extractor solution is an industry game-changer for effortless data extraction into Board’s Intelligent Planning Platform. We are thrilled to honor Quisitive with this special award,” said Board Americas Vice President of Channel and Alliances Christopher Wheeler.

Quisitive Executive Vice President of Go-To-Market Lane Sorgen added: “Quisitive is pleased to be recognized by Board for our powerful partnership. We continue to look for opportunities to leverage our deep Microsoft, ERP, and FP&A skill sets to collaborate with partners and deliver fantastic value to joint customers.”

About Quisitive:
Quisitive (TSXV: QUIS, OTCQX: QUISF) is a premier, global Microsoft partner that harnesses the Microsoft cloud platform and complementary technologies, including custom solutions and first-party offerings, to generate transformational impact for enterprise customers. Our Cloud Solutions business focuses on helping enterprises move, operate, and innovate in the three Microsoft clouds. Our Payments Solutions division leverages the PayiQ platform powered by Microsoft Azure to transform the payment processing industry into an entirely new source of customer engagement and consumer value. Quisitive serves clients globally from seventeen employee hubs across the world. For more information, visit www.Quisitive.com and follow @BeQuisitive.

About Board International
Board’s Intelligent Planning Platform delivers solutions that help over 2,000 organizations worldwide plan smarter — enabling actionable insights and better outcomes. Placed as a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software, Board helps leading enterprises discover crucial insights which drive business decisions and unify strategy, finance and operations through more integrated and intelligent planning to achieve full control of performance. Partnering with Board, global enterprises such as H&M, BASF, Burberry, Toyota, Coca-Cola, KPMG, and HSBC have digitally transformed their planning processes. Founded in 1994, and now with 25 offices worldwide, Board International is recognized by leading analysts including BARC, Gartner, and IDC.
www.board.com

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Matt Glover and John Yi
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Improved Financial Forecasting, Reporting, and Scenario Planning for the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group
Ottawa-based sports and entertainment company improves its financial forecasting, reporting, and scenario planning with the help of Quisitive and the implementation of Board.
OSEG

In this case study:

Client: Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG)

Industry: Sports & Entertainment

Products and Services:

  • Financial Forecasting & Reporting
  • Operational Analysis
  • Scenario Planning
  • Board®

Country: Canada

“Quisitive was very professional, responsive, and hands-on at every stage of our Board implementation and demonstrated a high level of expertise not only with Board but also with corporate performance management processes and principals. They offered best practice suggestions and guidance and were incredibly flexible – which is rare for a solution provider.”
David Porter
Senior Vice President of Finance & Technology

Overview

 The Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG) embarked on a journey to replace its manual Excel-based budgeting and reporting process with a sophisticated and flexible financial and operational analysis and reporting solution. With the help of Corporate Renaissance Group (Quisitive), a Premier Board® Partner, OSEG implemented the Board decision-making platform and has since realized significant time savings, better quality, and timeliness of reporting, and improved scenario planning for decision-making. Board now supports OSEG’s complex budget allocations and operational budget forecasts and has allowed OSEG to cut the time needed for budgeting and reporting by 50%.

Ottawa’s Destination for Sports, Entertainment, Shopping and Dining

 OSEG was founded in 2008 to re-establish Canadian Football League (CFL) football in Canada’s Capital Region. OSEG partnered with the City of Ottawa to develop the plan and oversee the transformation of Lansdowne into a destination of choice for live events, cultural activities, shopping, dining, and recreational activities.

 

Lansdowne has transformed into Ottawa’s premier venue for concerts and major sporting events with over 100 games and events each year. Today’s Lansdowne is a live-work-play district featuring the TD Place stadium and arena complex, which hosts two sports teams: The REDBLACKS (Canadian Football League) and 67’s (Ontario Hockey League). The complex seats 24,000 for stadium sports and concerts, and up to 9,000 guests for arena sports and entertainment. Lansdowne also hosts two condominium towers and townhomes with a combined 280 units, a 360,000 sq. ft. shopping/entertainment district, an office tower, 1,300 underground parking spaces, and an 18-acre urban park. OSEG is comprised of 10 companies and 34 departments to manage this complex enterprise. 

 

In 2017, David Porter joined OSEG as Senior Vice President of Finance & Technology to manage finance, information technology, and box office operations for all the legal entities within OSEG’s corporate structure. Having more than twenty years of experience as a CFO and a background in financial technology, David set out to simplify and improve financial planning at OSEG. 

 

“It used to take our finance team days to prepare monthly and quarterly financial reports for executives. Our budgeting process took even longer, and we didn’t have an easy way to do effective scenario planning,” said David. 

“I knew that Board could deliver a flexible and powerful solution that would handle complex budgeting templates, calculations, and allocations, as well as game and event budgeting. I was also aware that Board could integrate data from our existing systems and would offer a lot of features and potential to expand its use into other areas of the organization.”
David Porter
Senior Vice President of Finance & Technology

The Challenge: Manual and Time-Consuming Budgeting and Reporting

After launching in 2008, OSEG implemented key business systems to help with ticket sales and resources planning. Microsoft DynamicsERP was used to manage accounting functions and a third-party solution was put in place to manage and track ticket sales. To track financial trends and provide leadership reporting, the finance team had to manually export and compile data from those systems into Excel. The process was time-consuming and posed several challenges for OSEG, including: 

Challenges

  • Outdated data being used in budgets and reports 
  • Different versions of the same reports being shared 
  • Difficulty verifying data being extracted from other systems 
  • A lot of time spent cleaning and consolidating data and spreadsheets from multiple sources and departments 
  • Lack of scenario analysis and forecasting capabilities 
  • No dashboards or visuals for quick analysis 
  • Difficulty incorporating ticket sales data into operational reports 
  • Inability to generate multi-year budgets needed for planning 

Solutions

  • Board 
  • Microsoft Dynamics ERP 

The Situation: Versatile and Robust Financial Analysis and Reporting

Having worked with Quisitive and the Board platform at a previous organization, David knew how Board could be used as a transformational solution for OSEG and deliver financial reporting, integration with Dynamics, allocations, audit trails, versatility, budgeting templates, administrative control, security, and workflows. 

 

OSEG made the decision to implement Board and contracted Corporate Renaissance Group (Quisitive) to help lead the project. Being a Board and Microsoft Partner and having more than 31 years in the technology and Dynamics space, Quisitive helped to plan, implement and shape how Board was used at OSEG. 

 

“Quisitive was very professional, responsive, and hands-on at every stage of our Board implementation and demonstrated a high level of expertise not only with Board but also with corporate performance management processes and principals. They offered best-practice suggestions and guidance and were incredibly flexible – which is rare for a solution provider,” said David.

 

OSEG and Quisitive knew that a successful launch of Board would require thorough planning. “Multiple discovery sessions were held with OSEG to make sure that the scope and deliverables of the project were well defined, understood, and documented by both parties,” said Quang Dinh, Lead Solution Designer at Quisitive. “It was important to us that David and his team were active in every step so that together, we could design their perfect system that could scale and create value.”

 

Working together, OSEG and Quisitive were able to launch Board in less than 180 days. “We were able to implement the first iteration within 2 months from start to finish to meet our budget cycle,” said David. 

The Benefits

Automated and Timely Budgeting and Planning

One of the biggest advantages to OSEG is Board’s ability to create a centralized and automated process for timely budgeting and planning and to deliver granular real-time dashboards for instant insights.

 

Using Board, OSEG has been able to: 

  • Provide one integrated solution for financial, operational, sales, and resource reporting for better decision-making 
  • Enhance budget agility, financial analysis, and scenario planning 
  • Reduce the time spent cleaning and consolidating data and preparing reports by half 
  • Improve staff utilization by reducing the people-hours needed in the reporting process 
  • Improve the timeliness and accuracy of budgets and reports for better decision-making 

One Integrated System

Integrating all its ticket sales, ERP, and financial data into one system has enabled OSEG to save weeks of time, centralize financial reporting, and establish data confidence so that leaders can trust the data being displayed and use to make better, faster decisions regarding the business. 

 

“Board allows us to take all ticket sales, financials, and resource data into one place so it’s ready at our fingertips in real-time for analysis. Our users can easily drill-down and drill-through to the transactional level and even review digital copies of supplier invoices right within Board. Board offers a level of granular analysis that we need to for proper planning across the enterprise. We can even budget food and beverage and consider the impact of occupancy at games and events.” 

 

Board provides the flexibility and adaptability required to meet OSEG’s specific needs, enabling the organization to keep all critical data tied together in one system and produce in-depth reports with detailed variance analysis 

Enhanced Budget Agility, Analysis and Scenario Planning

Using Board, OSEG can now update and reference budgets and forecasts very quickly, produce scenario and variance analysis, and analyze data from multiple sources with ease. This was particularly helpful in 2020 when the global pandemic and related public lockdowns created massive uncertainty for businesses like OSEG. 

 

“Board has definitely helped to improve the accuracy of our budgets and provide decision-makers with various scenario analyses. When COVID-19 hit, we were able to issue our revised forecasts in a very short period, helping executives to weather through very difficult times. We had more time to review, analyze, and make sound financial decisions. Board gave us that agility and insight,” said David. 

 

Thanks to Quisitive’s team and Board’s flexibility, OSEG now has one active budget, one active forecast, and two other detailed future year budget versions in place at the same time, with data seamlessly flowing amongst the four. 

Timely Reporting and Drill-Down

The finance team at OSEG now enjoys fast, timely reporting and the organizational decision-makers are experiencing the benefits of real-time reporting and drill-down into core financial insights. 

 

“Our users are very happy with the ability to access various reports and dashboards anytime and from anywhere,” noted David. “Our executive team particularly enjoys the dashboards that are available at their fingertips where they can drill-down and drill-through to the transactional level and can even review digital copies of supplier invoices right within Board. Everything is right there in Board all the time!” 

 

The ability of Board to offer such granular visibility has been a huge advantage for the organization. 

Reduced Budgeting Time and Improved Staff Utilization

Since implementing Board, OSEG has cut their time spent on budgeting and reporting by half, saving weeks of time. In addition, because users enter budget data directly into Board, all financial reports are available immediately, eliminating the need for data consolidation and cleaning, and giving decision-makers uninterrupted real-time access to financial information. 

 

 

“Board has helped us save an incredible amount of time that used to be spent on gathering and compiling data. Our finance team can now spend that time on the quality of our budgets to forecast and analyze the data to produce business results.”
David Porter
Senior Vice President of Finance & Technology

“We used to have multiple Excel budget workbooks being distributed, edited, and compiled. It was a lengthy and difficult process especially when there were different versions of the workbooks. Now, users enter budget data directly in Board and financial reports are immediately available.”

The Future of OSEG with the Board Decision- Making Platform

OSEG plans to continue to expand the use of Board for balance sheet and cash flow analysis and will work with Quisitive to extend the use of Board to other areas of the organization. 

 

“Board is an incredibly flexible platform and we have been able to work with Quisitive to implement modules and functions gradually as we need,” said David. “This flexibility allows us to save costs and roll out enterprise wide corporate performance management on our schedule.” 

 

“Our modules are completely customized to fit our needs, which is a level of flexibility that none of the other platforms were able to offer—and means the future opportunities for us to leverage Board is limitless,” said David. 

 

 

City Harvest Feature Image: a food delivery truck delivers apples
City Harvest Implements Board for Improved Financial Reporting Across Projects and to Support its Aggressive Growth Strategy
City Harvest’s Finance team partnered with Quisitive to implement Board, resulting in improvements their financial business processes.
6915309-logo

In this case study:

Client: City Harvest

Industry: Public Sector

Products and Services: Board®

Country: USA

“Quisitive demonstrated a high level of expertise and professionalism at every turn. They provided constructive advice, consulted us on budget structures and reporting, and worked to ensure our users were comfortable using the technology.”
ARABELLE GATILAO
Director of Finance, City Harvest

Overview

 City Harvest, New York City’s largest non-profit food rescue organization, quickly realized that depending on spreadsheets for effective financial planning and reporting was an inefficient way of handling the numerous projects and daily transactions they manage. 

 

City Harvest’s Finance team partnered with Quisitive to implement Board as a solution to their spreadsheet woes. This move resulted in drastic improvements in City Harvest’s financial business processes, including: 

  • Improved financial planning & streamlined budgeting administration 
  • Integration of multiple data sources & account segments into one platform 
  • A reduction in the budgeting timeline by 20 days 
  • Increased accuracy of data collected 
  • Faster access to information and reports 

Feeding New York City

 City Harvest began in 1982 when a group of concerned New Yorkers saw nutritious food going to waste in restaurants and realized that this food could be redirected to soup kitchens and food pantries to help feed neighbors in need. Since then, City Harvest has rescued more than 750 million pounds of food, and delivered it, free of charge, to hundreds of food pantries, soup kitchens and community partners across New York City. The organization now manages a fleet of 22 trucks, 160 full-time employees, and 10,000 volunteers annually who collectively help feed the nearly 1.2 million New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity. City Harvest is New York City’s private response to hunger, and the work they do is supported by individual and corporate donations and foundation grants.

The Need for Board at City Harvest 

Prior to using Board, City Harvest was using approximately 200 spreadsheets for corporate budgeting and planning. Since these spreadsheets were not connected, financial information had to be gathered and manually inputted and consolidated from many sources, which was time-consuming and contributed to delays in budgeting timelines. 

 

City Harvest needed to ensure that its financial administrative processes were working as efficiently as possible to address the organization’s multi-faceted business model and support its aggressive growth plans. 

 

City Harvest began searching for a corporate performance management platform that integrated well with their existing Microsoft Dynamics™ GP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and made it simple to manage complex allocations and projects. 

 

A new system would need to meet their requirements and deliver on results: 

  • streamline the budgeting process for the entire organization 
  • meet budget timelines and create actionable reports 
  • manage complex cost allocations and projects 
  • reduce staff costs and time spent on budgeting 
  • streamline decision making and data entry processes 

Moreover, they needed a partner that could fully support their vision and work with them to launch a new system in a tight six-month timeline. 

 

City Harvest reviewed many systems and ultimately chose Board because of its flexibility, simple interface, powerful reporting, audit trail capabilities, multi-contributor access permissions, ability to track personnel expenses, robust administrative controls, advanced security, integration with Dynamics GP, and impressive modeling and forecasting options. 

 

City Harvest engaged Quisitive, a Premier Board Partner and leader in financial management consulting, to plan and implement their Board Solution. Board was configured to: 

  • provide managers with access to reports 
  • give each staff member a unique login 
  • allow staff to edit and view budgets based on set permissions 
  • provide error-free, dynamic reporting with built-in cost allocations
  • create validation reports to ensure that correct information is captured consistently 

  • provide data integrity across many users for increased confidence in the numbers being presented 

“It was clear that Board could help streamline our financial operations and refine financial information.”
ARABELLE GATILAO
Director of Finance, City Harvest

City Harvest’s Journey with Quisitive & Board

Quisitive worked with the City Harvest team to plan a successful launch of Board. Understanding how to configure Board appropriately meant that the Quisitive team had to be extremely responsive and hands-on. No stone was left unturned. Quisitive ensured the Scope of Work was well defined and updates were communicated regularly and that users were given the training needed to be successful. 

 

Quisitive’s in-depth knowledge of financial systems and flexibility in understanding business models and reporting requirements helped ensure that Board was fully configured and launched in time for City Harvest’s budget season. 

Well-Defined Scope of Work

Both the Quisitive and City Harvest teams needed to clearly understand what was required and the best features of Board that would solve the issues. The scope of work was detailed and there was regular communication between both teams, thus eliminating confusion and increasing the speed that Board was implemented. 

Focused Implementation

Quisitive worked with City Harvest to make use of Board’s ability to add modules ‘piece-by-piece’. As such, the team was able to focus on developing use-cases and functionality that would allow for the greatest short-term impact and allow the City Harvest team to launch Board within 6 months. Quisitive also worked with City Harvest to stagger the implementation to allow for testing, user feedback, and refinements to ensure that each component and process was rolled out as efficiently as possible and continued to build on success. 

Guided User Training

Training was an essential component of this stage of the process. All staff members were trained in how to effectively use Board. 

Results

Since launching Board in January 2019, City Harvest has been able to realize significant benefits and improvements to their financial planning & reporting process; including: 

  • Reduced budgeting timeline by a total of 20 days, resulting in a faster budgeting & reforecasting season. 
  • Easy access to real-time budgets and reports by managers, increasing visibility into key financials and improving the accuracy of budgets & reports. 
  • Establishing one uniform source for financial and operational data across the organization. 
  • Provided more accurate insights into future budgets & financial forecasting. 

City Harvest plans to move beyond the budgeting function to include integration of financial data from other sources. One such integration involves tracking salary and benefits information for employees. 

 

They also plan to use Board as a data warehouse for storing and efficiently using all of their financial data. 

 

Moreover, City Harvest is excited to see what benefits they will realize from Board’s forecasting capabilities across cost centers and amidst a time of rapid growth. 

 

“Using Board, managers have an easier way of working with and understanding their budgets. This has improved the participation in and accuracy of our data and reports. We can now spend more time ensuring continued sound fiscal management of City Harvest.”

Board – Intelligent Planning Platform - Technology Page Hero Image, Board logo and mock up of board on Desktop, laptop, and mobile
On-Demand: Budgeting Boo-tcamp: Conquer Your Finance Fears with Board
Discover how you can face your budgeting and finance fears with Board + Quisitive.

Say goodbye to planning, and hello to intelligent planning.

Board is a revolutionary solution designed for financial planning and analysis (FP&A). This solution integrates with Microsoft Dynamics, simplifying your budgeting, forecasting, and planning operations.

TORONTO, June 20, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Quisitive Technology Solutions, Inc. (“Quisitive” or the “Company”) (TSXV: QUIS, OTCQX: QUISF), a premier Microsoft solutions provider and payments solutions provider, has partnered with Board International (“Board”) to directly connect its financial planning and analysis (“FP&A”) solutions to Quisitive’s Microsoft Dynamics offering.

Board International, is a leading global provider of Intelligent Planning Solutions which help organizations to plan smarter, enabling actionable insights and better outcomes. With Board, a Microsoft-preferred solution, companies can manage and control their entire planning process from goal setting down to operational execution in one, user-friendly environment.

Quisitive and its acquired organizations have been premier partners with Board for over ten years. In the past year, the Company has worked in close partnership with Board to create a connector between the Board solutions portfolio and Microsoft technologies to enable 360-degree insights for joint customers. Quisitive worked in conjunction with Board to develop a direct connector, soon to be available on the Microsoft Marketplace, between the general ledger data captured in Dynamics 365 and Board’s planning platform to enhance the FP&A capabilities of enterprises leveraging Microsoft technologies. This connector allows for previously unavailable visibility and efficiencies, enabling better planning and analysis.

The partnership between Board and Quisitive enables more diverse recurring revenue streams, expands Quisitive’s portfolio of offers, and combines technology capabilities with business needs to deliver value to customers. Quisitive provides customers with an end-to-end FP&A experience from implementation of the Board solution, integrating it into their existing systems, and training staff to operationalize. Partnership with Board enables a go-to-market motion direct into the office of the CFO, creating additional entry points for Quisitive to help customers initiate, grow, and innovate in their digital transformation journey.

“The integration between Board’s Intelligent Planning platform and the general ledger data hosted in Microsoft Dynamics 365 opens up exciting new possibilities for the partnership between Board and Quisitive. Our customers need more comprehensive visibility into their data landscape, and this collaboration allows us to deliver intelligent planning solutions through Board that seamlessly integrate with Dynamics. By doing so, we empower businesses with faster and more precise insights, adding significant value to their operations,” said Marco Limena CEO of Board International.

“FP&A is a critical business need for many organizations, and through a close partnership with Board and our innovative connector to the Microsoft Dynamics platform – enabled by our deep Microsoft expertise – Quisitive is delivering enhanced FP&A capabilities to customers. It’s an opportunity for us to better serve customers’ needs while creating additional recurring revenue by selling Board’s solution, and enhancing the value proposition of the Dynamics platform,” said Quisitive CEO Mike Reinhart.

About Quisitive:
Quisitive (TSXV: QUIS, OTCQX: QUISF) is a premier, global Microsoft partner that harnesses the Microsoft cloud platform and complementary technologies, including custom solutions and first-party offerings, to generate transformational impact for enterprise customers. Our Cloud Solutions business focuses on helping enterprises move, operate, and innovate in the three Microsoft clouds. Our Payments Solutions division, leverages the PayiQ platform powered by Microsoft Azure to transform the payment processing industry into an entirely new source of customer engagement and consumer value. Quisitive serves clients globally from seventeen employee hubs across the world. For more information, visit www.Quisitive.com and follow @BeQuisitive.

About Board International
Board’s Intelligent Planning Platform delivers solutions that help over 2,000 organizations worldwide plan smarter — enabling actionable insights and better outcomes. Placed as a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software, Board helps leading enterprises discover crucial insights which drive business decisions and unify strategy, finance and operations through more integrated and intelligent planning to achieve full control of performance. Partnering with Board, global enterprises such as H&M, BASF, Burberry, Toyota, Coca-Cola, KPMG, and HSBC have digitally transformed their planning processes.
Founded in 1994, and now with 25 offices worldwide, Board International is recognized by leading analysts including BARC, Gartner, and IDC.
www.board.com

Quisitive Investor Contact
Matt Glover and John Yi
Gateway Investor Relations
[email protected]
949-574-3860

Board Event Feature Image, Financial Planning for H2 - Graphic of a man standing at a white board and connecting the "dots" of financial data points.
On-Demand: Navigating H2 Financial Uncertainties with Board
Take a break and see how Board’s decision-making platform can empower you to navigate the uncertainties of H2.
Board Event Feature Image, Financial Planning for H2 - Graphic of a man standing at a white board and connecting the "dots" of financial data points.
Are you struggling with mid-year reporting, financial planning & accurately forecasting for the rest of the year?

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Take a break and see how Board’s decision-making platform can empower you to navigate the uncertainties of H2. Unlock advanced analytics, streamline workflows, and gain real-time insights to drive informed decisions.

 

Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your financial planning for the remainder of the year.

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