Introduction
McCarthy-Bush Corporation through its subsidiaries operates in construction, mining, real estate development, and steel fabrication sectors. There are twelve companies under the McCarthy-Bush Corporation umbrella – some of the subsidiaries include Bush Construction, McCarthy Improvement, Linwood Mining & Minerals Corporation, Blackheart Slag, LLC, Clinton Engineering – General Contractors, AMSCO – Ash Management Systems, and OERTEL Metal Works. McCarthy-Bush Corporation and its subsidiaries are based in Davenport, Iowa.
Mike Daniel is the seasoned CFO at McCarthy-Bush Corporation. He has led the finance team for over six years. In addition to his finance responsibilities, he holds HR, business development, and operations duties, as well as serve on the board of directors. The McCarthy-Bush Corporation has been a DataBlend client since 2018.
Situation
McCarthy-Bush Corporation and its subsidiaries were using three different ERP systems that needed to be synced with Workday Adaptive Planning. They wanted to bring more depth and visibility to their accounting and finance data and reduce the manual lift on the finance and accounting team. Workday Adaptive Planning recommended DataBlend for the integration because of the complexity involving McCarthy-Bush’s disparate ERPs. McCarthy-Bush didn’t want a custom integration, or to develop their own API connection, so DataBlend was the perfect solution.
Challenge
The finance and accounting team at McCarthy-Bush Corporation and its subsidiaries were spending countless hours trying to manually process and update their financial data into Workday Adaptive Planning. To run quarterly forecasting reports they had to manually export the data from each ERP, implement eliminations to ensure the accuracy of their consolidated financial statements, and then upload to Workday Adaptive Planning. The whole process from start to finish was a five-day effort that took several people to complete. The process was excessively time consuming and error prone. Various studies have reported that nearly 9 out of 10 spreadsheets (88%) contain errors – and many of these errors were from human error.
Solution
By integrating DataBlend and connecting their disparate ERP systems to Workday Adaptive Planning, McCarthy-Bush was able to automatically sync their systems, which sped up the process significantly.
“Because of the increased time savings and automations, my finance and accounting team was able to spend time on business analysis of the data instead of working on the data,” Mike Daniel, CFO at McCarthy-Bush Corporation. “It no longer took multiple people to export, manipulate, and upload. We were able to reduce mid-level headcount in the department naturally when people left and not feel the need to replace them.”
What used to take five-days to do, now happens in an instant. McCarthy-Bush schedules their updates overnight, so they start each day with synced systems.
“My controller can do final entries for month-end. Before implementing DataBlend, he had to wait for several people to finish manipulating the data before he could even start month-end.”
With DataBlend, McCarthy-Bush:
- Automated the export, transform, and load process
- Gained access to real-time, accurate financial data
- Decreased opportunity for errors
- Increased time savings
- Decreased monthly workload
- Gained a support team that replaces the need for internal IT resources
Conclusion
Since partnering with DataBlend, Mike and his team can now focus on higher value work rather than pushing paper around and manipulating spreadsheets.
“DataBlend has been a great partner. Since our original implementation, we have consolidated ERPs and DataBlend was able to assist us in that endeavor. DataBlend’s support team is exceptionally proactive – they send alerts when something isn’t happening or if there are any red flags. Someone always reaches out and it’s excellent.”
