Introduction
The Home for Little Wanderers, a not-for-profit with locations in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, provides health and human support services to children and their families in need of assistance. Jeff Aimonetti, Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis,
has led the FP&A team over the last six months during which he has had a close working relationship with the team at DataBlend. The Home for Little Wanders became a client of DataBlend in 2020. DataBlend was recommended by Alight/Carlson, the software reseller, as the integration tool of choice.
Situation
The Home for Little Wanderers is a user of Microsoft Dynamics SL Accounting System and opted to purchase and integrate with the Workday Adaptive Planning ERP application to bring more depth and visibility to their accounting and finance data. DataBlend was the recommended integration solution to connect Dynamics SL and Adaptive together.
Challenge
Jeff was spending hours of time on manual data manipulation, such as extracting data from Dynamics SL, formulating equations and modifying data in excel, and checking for errors, field mapping and other Adaptive system requirements before uploading data back into the Adaptive system. The consistent, repetitive need to complete this manual work to get the job done was time consuming, redundant, and opened the door to data errors.
“Without having DataBlend to do the connection, in order to get actuals into Adaptive, it would require downloading the spreadsheet from the accounting system then upload again into Adaptive and doing that as a manual process is time consuming. There’s a lot of formatting issues to get the file to upload manually so with DataBlend doing it, I don’t have to worry about it, I don’t have to do it. It just happens.” ~ Jeff Aimonetti, Manager, FP&A , The Home for Little Wanderers
Solution
By integrating Microsoft Dynamics SL via DataBlend’s data agent, and its API connection to Adaptive Insights, Jeff and his team at The Home for Little Wanderers:
- Automated at least 12 manual steps in the export, transform, and load process
- Gained access to real-time, accurate financial data
- Decreased opportunity for errors 100%
- Increased time savings
- Decreased monthly workload
- Gained a support team that replaces the need for internal IT resources
“We’re actually looking to expand our business with DataBlend as we work on consolidating more data into Adaptive and as we work on getting some of our newer systems worked out to the point that they can export data; we’re going to have DataBlend bridge that into Adaptive for us for the same reasons of convenience and accuracy.” ~ Jeff Aimonetti
Conclusion
Since partnering with DataBlend, Jeff has fully realized the value DataBlend has generated for him and The Home for Little Wanderers. Jeff’s desire to continue using the integration tool by connecting each added application to further scale the insights generated for the FP&A team is the exact type of relationship we often find ourselves in with our customers. By helping Jeff move away from manual, time-consuming, and error prone processes, DataBlend has not only provided Jeff with more time to focus on financial planning and analysis, but also a little extra relief from the end of month stress that comes with manual monthly close-outs.
