“Thanks to Tagetik we have halved the time required to create our budget, income statement and balance sheet forecasts and our cash flow forecasts.”
Yanis Najid - Chief Financial Officer, Arrow Génériques

Situation analysis and specific requirements

Arrow Génériques is a young pharmaceutical laboratory that has expanded considerably since 2002. The Excel spreadsheets created to draw up the annual budget when the company was founded reached their technical limitations, becoming the source of potential errors and sluggish processing. They no longer reflected Arrow Génériques’ evolution over a few years from a start-up company to an important medium-size organisation with a turnover of 130 million euros, 130 employees, many distribution channels, 6,000 clients and 330 products. 

Annual budget creation was spread over two months, particularly due to the problems encountered when drawing up the balance sheets and cash flow forecasts required by the shareholders.

The Project  

In the first quarter of 2009, Arrow Génériques’ Finance Department decided to replace the in-house tools with dedicated budget creation software. Specifications were given to a service company which shortlisted various offers. Following a demonstration of its overall capabilities and possible applications, the Tagetik solution was selected. 

Objectives

The objectives of Arrow Génériques’ Finance Department concerned the creation of the annual budget, from taking into account the sales and costs forecasts of the various departments to creating the income statement, the balance sheet forecast and the cash flow forecast. Implementation of the Tagetik solution was aimed at safeguarding and speeding up the budgeting processes, improving forecasting accuracy and allowing for several audits during the financial year. 

Results

The Tagetik solution was installed at Arrow Génériques during the summer of 2009. “The setting-up phase was more extensive than we had anticipated, with the Tagetik software being so adaptable to individual needs. We were therefore able to completely tailor this solution to our requirements and to the type of reports requested by our management and shareholders”, says Yanis Najid, the CFO of Arrow Génériques.  

As predicted, the project was 100% operational by September 2009. The creation of the budget and income statement proceeded normally without a hitch and faster than anticipated. The generation of the balance sheet and cash flow forecast progressed three times faster than in previous years. 

All in all, Arrow Génériques estimates that it has halved the time required for the complete creation of its budget, from the compiling of estimates to the cash flow forecasts. Arrow Génériques now has a complete tool for creating and monitoring its annual budgets. As from 2010, Arrow Génériques’ Finance Department plans monthly budget audits, made possible by its control of the software. The latter also facilitates the creation and analysis of various budget estimates, which had been virtually impossible due to the clumsiness of its previous tools.

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