Centerline Capital Group (NYSE: CHC), one of the nation’s leading full-service real estate finance companies, has selected Cartesis 10, the integrated platform for financial planning, consolidation and analytics. The Cartesis 10 solution will support Centerline’s strategic business objectives in addition to tackling enterprise-wide performance management challenges.
With more than 500 employees in 10 offices throughout the United States, Centerline needed a fully integrated solution in order to keep the company’s various internal teams strategically aligned. Cartesis 10 will alleviate Centerline’s current reliance on spreadsheets for data collection and manipulation. Switching from a manual, labor-intensive spreadsheet process is necessary to meet the company’s increasing budgeting and reporting needs.
“Prior to Cartesis 10, any requests for additional reports or updates to the forecast required spending considerable time on changes in the excel model,” said Thomas Speroni, Vice President of Budgeting and Forecasting at Centerline. “Cartesis 10 allows us to plan and forecast in significantly less time as well as benefit from the strategic advantages offered by the solution, including what-if scenarios and competitor benchmarking. In addition to our enhanced forecasting capabilities, our overall budgeting process has improved, especially with the support for the driver-based budgeting process.”
Centerline now has the ability to integrate planning and management reporting, modeling and analytic reporting into a single application that is easy to use and manage. Users can create plans and forecasts with relevant business drivers and supporting details and drill down through those plans for analysis in real-time. Cartesis 10 also provides Centerline the power to change plans and forecasts by taking into account surrounding business issues that may impact the company. Additionally, the dashboards and key performance indicators in Cartesis 10 will help Centerline visualize and gain information required for better decision making. One of the key requirements for Centerline in selecting a performance management solution was compatibility with its existing Microsoft SQL server investment. Cartesis developed its Analytics product line around Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Service 2005 Analysis Services to ensure seamless integration with the MS platform for Centerline.
“As an industry leader, Centerline recognizes the importance of having trustworthy, accurate data for financial, budgeting and planning activities,” said Trevor Walker, Vice President of Marketing, Cartesis. “Improving upon Centerline’s budgeting process with the Cartesis 10 solution will not only enrich their overall financial profile, but will also decrease cycle time and lower their total cost of ownership. It’s been exciting to work with Centerline to help it address important business needs, and demonstrate our expertise in the budgeting solutions.”