D&W Fine Pack Chooses Planful To Drive Intuitive Financial Consistency and Visibility

D&W Fine Pack (D&W) works hard to live up to the highest standards and become the supplier of choice for customers buying its containers made from paperboard, compostable, aluminum, plastic, and other materials. The company prides itself on its national footprint, quality products, and custom and eco-friendly packaging solutions. When it was time to move off spreadsheet-based consolidations and build a foundation for future growth, D&W turned to Planful.

D&W runs seven manufacturing and distribution facilities across the US, with a team of controllers managing financial reporting, budgeting, planning, and more across four different ERP platforms. For years, and like many growing organizations, the company had relied on Excel as the backbone of its financial processes. But, along with the manual effort, the potential for error, and file frustrations that come with spreadsheets, D&W also had different controllers generating financial reporting in varying formats.

At the company’s headquarters in Illinois, additional inefficiencies were created as leadership and corporate finance teams sifted through the data. So, they decided to bring in a purpose-built financial performance management system to modernize and streamline close and consolidation.

Enter Debbie Nona, now D&W’s Vice President and Corporate Controller, who started as the company’s financial reporting manager and whose first day was also the kickoff for the company’s Planful implementation project.

“My role was to get the company on Planful for consolidation,” Debbie recalled. “It was taking hours for the controllers to create their monthly financial reports. What made it rough was that each did it in a slightly different format and it was all in Excel. We had to bring some efficiency to the process and create a bit more clarity and traceability along the way.”

D&W set out to streamline, automate, and accelerate its close and consolidation process.

“Our initial expectation was to have a consultant build most of the reports, but Planful was very intuitive, so I built a lot of the reports on my own, with the consultant helping when we needed it,” Debbie added.

The project kicked off in July, and by November, “everything was up and running full speed” for close and consolidation and monthly financial reporting, according to Debbie. Within a year, D&W added Planful Structured Planning. Shortly after, the company engaged with Bakerfield Solutions, a Planful partner, to build budgeting models and use sales data to drive manufacturing planning and annual budgeting.

“For anyone familiar with pivot tables or who uses Excel frequently, it’s easy to switch to Planful and create even the most complex reports,” said Debbie. “I’ve worked in many other systems in the past. Planful is the most intuitive to use. It makes sense. It’s easy and fast. The data load is very simple. And we’ve had no issues with new users picking it up very quickly.”

D&W set out to reduce its reliance on slow, manual spreadsheets. With Planful, it has a financial performance management platform that brings simplicity, consistency, and visibility across close and consolidations, financial reporting, budgeting, annual planning, and more. Plus, Planful is intuitive enough to deliver a truly finance-owned solution.

“Planful is so easy that we update the budget models ourselves,” said Debbie. “Bakerfield Solutions is our trusted partner for expert guidance when we have questions. But even with complex plant closures and converting manufacturing facilities to warehouses, it’s all easy in Planful because you’re able to make updates fluidly and quickly.”

Debbie noted Planful’s substitution variables, which are Planful’s proprietary dynamic placeholders that automatically adjust key parameters, like time periods or dimensions, so reports can be updated easily and almost instantly. Debbie explained: “It’s so easy to update all of our reports for the next period using substitution variables. I don’t have to manually change anything, and all of the reports are updated to the current month.”

Consistency is another benefit Planful delivers to D&W. Now, instead of manually-generated financial reports coming in different formats from different facilities, report packages are uniform across the company and can be created quickly.

“Our controllers just run one report, and Planful gives them the full suite of reports they need for the month,” Debbie explained. “This standard set of reports has increased the consistency of what our leadership team sees across the company, and that makes it easier to understand the complete picture. Planful helps with corporate reporting, too, since our cash flow statements can now be run anytime to generate a month-to-date or year-to-date cash flow in just a few clicks.”

Planful also brings more insights to D&W’s financials so everyone across the company can make better, more informed decisions.

“Our financial visibility is much more clear with Planful so that we can analyze the data quickly,” added Debbie. “Planful pulled our budgeting and modeling out of Excel to formalize how sales drives manufacturing, which feeds into our structured planning to drive budgeting for the entire year. And, implementing Planful demonstrated how much efficiency we could gain and helped me get that next promotion to director of accounting.”

When asked to quantify time savings from Planful, Debbie pointed out that plant controllers cut monthly cycles for creating reporting packages containing more than a dozen reports from hours to just 30 minutes. But Debbie added that Planful’s value comes from much more than just the time savings.

“The biggest benefit we’re getting from Planful is the quality of the financial insights,” Debbie concluded. “It’s saving us a lot of time over Excel, for sure, but we couldn’t even get some of these insights before. Now we have more clarity, more traceability, and all of the details are in Planful.”