Jaguar Mining is a young business, but its international operations require far more sophisticated consolidation processes than can be easily managed through Excel spreadsheets. To keep the numbers accurate without breaking the bank, the company turned to a hosted business performance management (BPM) solution aimed at the midmarket.

BPM Magazine:Tell me a little bit about what Jaguar Mining does.

Bob Katz:It's a Canadian gold mining company with operations in Brazil's Minas Gerais state. The company's headquarters are in Concord, New Hampshire, with 10 people in that office (it has 500 employees worldwide). Jaguar is really operating as a startup, although it's been in business for two or three years, because we're just now getting going with our mining properties. Jaguar's accounting and reporting are continuing to evolve to support the growing needs for management information and decision support.

I was originally brought in to assess the Excel solution the company had in place to support consolidation, budgeting, and forecasting, under my BI consulting company, F.A.C.T.S. (which stands for Financial Analysis and Control Technology Services LLC). Jaguar was using QuickBooks to do its headquarters accounting, with consolidations handled through an Excel spreadsheet process to include the Brazil results. About a year before I came on board, Jaguar felt they needed something more substantial to handle the consolidations process. They tried to build a consolidation/budgeting tool in Excel but found the workbook files too complex to manipulate on an ongoing basis. Excel wasn't structured enough to handle Jaguar's consolidations without somebody more or less spending their full time maintaining an Excel workbook.

BPM:What would a spreadsheet designed to handle corporate consolidations look like?

Katz:Corporate consolidations at Jaguar used to be performed in Excel as part of what was defined as the "corporate model" -- three separate workbooks, composed of over 100 linked spreadsheets, containing the financial and operational data for the mining and headquarters locations. Each sheet represented different functions for each mine and plant, including operating, capital, and cost data, as well as the monthly financial results.

The headquarters and local accounting staff would enter monthly accounting detail from the QuickBooks and RM systems and their associated trial balances into the corporate model to produce the external financial statements. Changing ledger accounts and reports, consolidating adjusting entries, and last-minute audit adjustments, however, made the Excel process very difficult to manage. In addition, Jaguar lacked a dedicated IT staff or a proficient VBA programmer who could address changes needed to support the model.

BPM:So, what did Jaguar change to get the budgeting and consolidations processes under better control?

Katz:The company is currently modifying its budgeting and consolidations processes to accommodate Adaptive Planning, which is an integrated, distributed, on-demand solution. The structured nature of the Adaptive Planning database has allowed a compression of the management of data because you can now look at various slices of the database associated with each individual function, from a mine, a plant, or an admin/headquarters operation. And then within the functions, the various capabilities of the functions within the model, such as capital, production, cost, debt -- each is identified in Adaptive as a separate sheet. It's a much-simplified view of the business model.

In addition, we have a dedicated individual member of the Brazil finance team -- who's actually sitting with me today -- who'll be the Adaptive Planning champion for the Brazil mining operations. He'll be working with the local Brazil finance staff to guide them to enter their forecasts and budgets directly into Adaptive rather than through Excel. And the folks up here in Concord have already entered their actuals, forecasts and budgets directly into Adaptive. The consolidations and budgeting pro-cesses are much quicker, more reliable, and better integrated now.

BPM:What do consolidations and reporting look like?

Katz:The headquarters and Brazil operations, in Brazilian GAAP, load their trial balance feeds from their source ledger information into separate plans in Adaptive and then add any consolidating adjusting entries or adjustments to support Canadian GAAP reporting. We've created some ETL capabilities to mirror what a transaction-based system would do in terms of a change in accounts and add that as a separate entity. After reviewing the screens to reconcile the respective entities, Adaptive exports the consolidated external financial statements and associated reporting to formatted Excel documents or templates so that we can present that for external and internal management reporting, both for financial and operational data.

BPM:How have these new processes been working for Jaguar?