Cbeyond Deploys Revelwood's BPM Suite

Cbeyond, a fast-growing, publicly-traded provider of integrated communications and IT services to more than 40,000 small businesses throughout the U.S., reportedly has deployed Revelwood’s BPM Suite.

 

Initially, the company managed everything on spreadsheets but as the company grew, found it failed to deliver results, said Barry Ferguson, Cbeyond’s (News - Alert) senior director of finance, whose team is responsible for investor relations, treasury and stock option administration, as well as the traditional finance, planning and forecast roles. 

 

He explained that their company is dealing with more than 50 cost centers, half of which had location designations. Cbeyond was also collecting and aggregating a number of Excel spreadsheets for revenue planning.

 

The company realized they spent around 70 percent of their time in checking, cross checking and validating the output, and had very little time for analysis. Also, they found it very difficult to get the data they required since they had to extract and then manipulate it in order to put it in a format they could use.

 

Cbeyond searched for a business performance management (BPM) solution that could give them sufficient time to do their next budget, which needed to be completed in just a few months. Ferguson decided on IBM Cognos (News - Alert) TM1 software and Revelwood, the business performance management solution provider, to implement it.

 

“Rapid and continued growth makes using spreadsheets for modeling, forecasting and analysis time consuming and unmanageable,” said Kenneth Wolf, Revelwood’s president and CEO. “We felt confident that TM1 would provide the kind of robust solution needed for more timely and accurate forecasting in both the short and long-term.”

 

Revelwood’s BPM Suite is a pre-built, entirely adaptable structure that accelerates the already rapid implementation times TM1 is known for. This ensured that Cbeyond’s BPM solution was up and running in time for their next budget cycle. Thanks to the BPM Suite, TM1 was active in just 10 weeks and their first budget was completed just a few weeks after that.

 

Encouraged by the success of application, Ferguson decided to integrate the application throughout their operations. Together with his team he began to build rolling forecasts and worked with different groups at Cbeyond to develop the processes needed for getting information back and forth between them. With TM1, Cbeyond has been able to revolutionize its budget and forecasting philosophy.

 

Today, Cbeyond uses the solution in other functional areas of the organization, such as HR, operations and accounting. 

 

“By marrying up the statistical data, such as head count or number of customers, with financial information, we can look at scalability and productivity in ways we never could before,” said Ferguson.