PAC slashes month-end close time in half

Petroleum Analyzer Company (PAC), part of the Indicor portfolio of 15 specialized manufacturing companies, faced a critical challenge common to many growing organizations. After several acquisitions, PAC operated seven manufacturing sites globally, with the majority of business conducted outside the United States. While all sites had been migrated to the same ERP system (IFS), each maintained different charts of accounts, commodity codes, and supplier structures: essentially creating seven or eight disparate systems that functioned as individual silos.

Eric Jackson, CFO at PAC, inherited what he describes as "every CFO's nightmare" - a fragmented data landscape where the ERP served adequately as a system of record but fell far short for reporting and analytics. The company, which manufactures instruments that measure and analyze petroleum products for safety and compliance (including critical applications like jet fuel sulfur testing), needed better visibility across operations to support their mission of enabling safe and sustainable fuel production.

PAC stood at a crossroads with limited options. A full ERP reimplementation (while potentially effective) was impractical as the company prepared for a spin-off to private equity ownership. "The last thing we wanted to do was tell the PE firm, 'Great news, our biggest initiative is an ERP implementation,'" Jackson recalls.

The alternative of doubling down on traditional data warehouse and ETL approaches would have meant continuing to work with aggregated data rather than transaction-level detail. This approach had already proven insufficient for answering the increasingly complex questions the business needed to address.

• Lack of customer visibility: A single customer could be current on payments at one site while delinquent at another, with no unified view
• Slow month-end close: Data dumps into Excel churned for 20 hours, effectively costing European and Asian teams an entire day of their 3-day close window
• Hidden operational inefficiencies: The same parts were being purchased from the same suppliers at different prices across locations, but aggregated data couldn't prove it
• Limited profitability insight: True customer profitability couldn't be measured due to transfer pricing complexities between sites
• Resistance to change: Operations teams were satisfied with existing tools and hesitant to adopt new solutions

Working with E Capital Advisors, PAC discovered Incorta's Direct Data Mapping technology, which offered a fundamentally different approach to data analytics. Rather than pursuing an expensive ERP overhaul or settling for aggregated warehouse data, PAC implemented Incorta to access transaction-level detail across all seven sites.

The implementation strategy was deliberate: PAC started by tackling a previously unsolved problem -end-to-end customer profitability analysis -to demonstrate value without internal resistance. This approach eliminated transfer pricing impacts between sites and married true manufacturing costs with sale prices, providing visibility down to individual product lines at specific customer sites.

From this foundation, PAC expanded to address:

• Unified accounts receivable: Consolidated AR detail from seven different ledgers into a single customer view
• Spend analytics: Transaction-level visibility into purchasing across all locations
• Automated month-end close reporting: Eliminated the 20-hour Excel processing bottleneck
• Executive dashboards: Real-time comparisons to plan and prior periods
• Supply chain and manufacturing analytics: Detailed operational metrics for on-time delivery and inventory management

Financial Impact

• 20% reduction in Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) through improved visibility and collection programs enabled by unified customer data
• 50% reduction in month-end close time, accelerating the path to analytics and decision-making
• Customer profitability visibility achieved for the first time, measuring down to site and product level within multi-location customers

Supply Chain Optimization

The operations team - initially the most resistant to change - became Incorta's biggest advocates. With transaction-level detail at their fingertips, supply chain and manufacturing teams now actively request new capabilities and drive continuous improvement initiatives.

Key supply chain improvements include:

• Enhanced on-time delivery performance through real-time visibility into production and fulfillment metrics
• Improved inventory management with detailed tracking across seven global manufacturing sites
• Procurement optimization: Identification of pricing discrepancies where identical parts from the same suppliers were purchased at different prices across locations, with the ability to prove it down to specific PO numbers
• Operational efficiency: Supply chain team transformed from change-resistant to "disciples" who are "at the top of the mountain shouting how much they love the capability"

Strategic Capabilities

PAC gained the ability to answer questions that were previously impossible to address:

• End-to-end customer profitability, including true manufacturing costs across sites
• Real-time spend analytics during periods of material inflation
• Detailed AR aging with unified customer views across multiple sites
• Automated executive reporting with accurate, timely data

Building on this foundation, PAC is now implementing:

• Price analytics for sophisticated pricing strategy
• Predictive demand forecasting for top-line planning
• Service and quality modules for expanded operational insight
• Sales incentive tracking automation
• AI-powered analytics: With transaction-level data now accessible, PAC is positioned to leverage AI for complex analyses like conjoint regression and predictive modeling - work that would have taken analysts months to complete manually

Perhaps most significantly, PAC achieved organizational buy-in across previously resistant teams. The operations group went from opposing change to actively championing new capabilities, demonstrating the power of providing detailed, actionable data to drive engagement and results.