Väderstad uses Mercur Business Control for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis including efficient financial reporting and compilation of subsidiary results monthly. Reports have the same look across all business units and everyone has access to comparable and quality assured numbers.
Within Väderstad, many parts of the company use Mercur Business Control, CEOs in the subsidiaries, finance, project managers, sales managers, and cost center managers.
The areas of use differ between different user groups, but in common, there is a focus on the ability to continuously monitor their area of responsibility. A highly appreciated and useful feature is "drill down" which allows users to analyze the underlying data themselves. Väderstad also appreciates always having access to information that is up to date, while reports on historical periods show comparable figures.
Väderstad is a family-owned company that started in Rune Stark's Mechanical Workshop in 1962. The company is still owned by the Stark family, which is now in the 3rd generation. Väderstad provides modern agriculture with highly efficient machinery and methods in agriculture.
In the past decade, Väderstad has experienced rapid growth with 5-fold sales since 2000. Sales reached SEK 2,276 M in the fiscal year 2018. The largest markets for Väderstad are Sweden, Germany, England, France, and Russia.
As Väderstad grew, they wanted to move away from their 20-year-old Excel model where the financial reporting from the respective subsidiaries came in monthly. Furthermore, there was no summation of the total result and the number of Excel files became very large and it was not easy to find the correct version when needed for an earlier period.
The company was mainly looking to reduce the manual work and the risk of misregistration in connection with the monthly reporting both at the subsidiaries and at the parent company.
We receive a good overview and have saved a lot of time in many areas after the introduction of Mercur Business Control.
Carola Gladh Ericson, Group Reporting Manager, Väderstad
The choice became Mercur as it is a system that is easy for the finance department to administer and build reports themselves. Another important parameter is the simplicity of loading data from several different business systems and managing different currencies.
Väderstad also saw it as something positive, to be able to make manual adjustments of the reported figures afterward as different accounting rules apply in different countries compared to the Swedish rules.
The goal of the project was initially to integrate Mercur with the financial systems and then build on it with other types of databases such as order statistics, staff, etc. The project started in autumn 2012 and soon Väderstad started importing data and several reports.
Väderstad uses Mercur for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis with a well-functioning financial reporting and summation of the subsidiaries monthly. The reports have the same appearance for all units and everyone looks at quality assured and comparable figures.
Within Väderstad, many parts of the company use Mercur, the CEOs of the subsidiaries, finance department, project managers, sales managers, and cost center managers. The area of use differs between different user groups, but the focus is on continuously being able to follow their area of responsibility.
A much appreciated and useful feature is the "drill down" which allows users to analyze underlying data themselves.
In addition, Väderstad feels that it is very positive to always have access to up-to-date information while reports on historical periods show comparable figures.
The future looks bright and we see great development potential together with Mercur!
Kristine Furberg, system administrator at Väderstad
At Väderstad, Mercur is integrated with the Jeeves and iScala business systems for reading transactions from the general ledger. At present, work is underway on setting up order data from both Jeeves and iScala. Possibly, personnel data will also be loaded in the future.
Carola Gladh Ericson, Group Reporting Manager at Väderstad, shares her best tips:
Set aside sufficient resources, although you can do a lot of yourself, some efforts are needed to get everything in place within a reasonable time.
Listen to the users, what is being asked?
Retrieve inspiration from other companies and their solutions.
Ask for help from your Mercur consultant if you are stuck or need someone to exchange ideas with.
Don't do everything at once, take one part at a time!
Väderstad's next step is a further development of order data to get a better picture of how sales and margins look ahead in time.
The company will also invest in reports for profitability analysis by product/market and personnel information to be able to follow relevant key figures. In the long run, you will also be able to rationalize more Excel reports and instead build them on a combination of general ledger and order data in Mercur.
System: Mercur Business Control Processer: Budgeting, Forecasting, Reporting, Analysis (financial as well as sales and order data)
Other: At Väderstad, Mercur is integrated with the Jeeves and iScala business systems. An important area of application is the follow-up of the subsidiaries' operations with uniform quality assured reports and dashboards that quickly give a picture of the development and focus on important areas to work with.
About the company: Väderstad provides modern agriculture with highly efficient agricultural machinery and methods. Väderstad has 768 employees in Sweden and internationally. In the early 1990s, the first subsidiary in the UK was opened, since then 12 subsidiaries in Europe and Russia have been added to that list. The latest addition is a subsidiary in Canada.
Revenue: 213 MEUR (2018). Employees: ca 768 (2018)
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Mercur Solutions LimitedOcean House, The Ring, Bracknell RG12 1AX, United Kingdom+44 (0) 1344 388 025info@mercur.com
Mercur Solutions ABVretenvägen 13, SE-171 54 Solna+46 (0)-459 69 00info@mercur.com
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A Swedish company with 50 years of experience, delivering solutions for performance management and business intelligence.