Cellular South is the largest privately held wireless provider in the United States. Based in Ridgeland, Miss., the company opened in 1988.
Cellular South has led the industry with innovative voice and data services and a commitment to providing the same kind of advanced wireless services in rural America that has long been available to those living and working in metropolitan areas.
Problem
According to Justin Croft, Cellular South’s manager of financial analysis and planning, the rapid growth of Cellular South notwithstanding, his department found itself saddled with an outdated and inefficient budgeting system.
“We were using an old general ledger system that flowed into our financial reporting tool,” he said. “You could report actuals against budget, but it really had no functionality in the way of creating a budget. This left us with multiple spreadsheets to create an operating budget, capital budget, sales forecast, customer budgets, and so on. All the data needed to compile our entire company’s budget was in disparate spreadsheets, and then we had to try to shove it into a system which was really never designed to do budgeting. Basically, we lacked the infrastructure to complete a comprehensive budget for the company.”
Solution
So Croft and his boss, Brian Jones, director of financial analysis and planning, began a search for a better way to do this in light of the department’s need to produce more dynamic, more detailed budgets in a faster and more efficient way. The two mapped out their alternatives and began evaluating and demoing what would eventually be 10 to 12 different systems. IBM Cognos TM1, one of the first systems they looked at, quickly stood out as a viable option.
“It is Excel-based and we wanted something that people here were familiar with,” said Jones. “Everyone uses Excel in their daily jobs. We didn’t want to bring something in that would result in people hesitating to use a new system which would be the case with a different looking interface.”
Cellular South held off on making a decision, first choosing to launch Oracle’s E-Business Suite to replace all of its accounting applications. Shortly after completing this implementation, they re-activated their search for a business performance management (BPM) solution. This led them once again to TM1 and to Revelwood as the implementer.
