Grand & Toy gets business performance clarity

Grand & Toy has implemented software from Clarity Systems to create an application that provides key performance indicators (KPI) reporting.

The office supply giant wanted to keep track of all those pens and pencils through a system that reports performance by different departments and levels of management, allowing the firm to compare data across different time periods.

Clarity 6 software provides budgeting, planning, reporting, modeling, consolidations, and forecasting in a Web-based application. Clarity views Grand & Toy as a unique customer because they have gone beyond simply budgeting or planning software, and instead have implemented what it refers to as “operational performance management.”

John Melodysta, chief administrative officer at Grand & Toy, said that using Clarity solutions for KPI reporting, identifying order defections, combating sales divergence, and even revamping their payroll system, has helped ROI as well as the company’s overall efficiency.

“If you’re going into it with the mindset you’re going to use it for just budgeting, it will cost you whatever it will cost you,” Melodysta said. “But, if you start to make use of all the other applications they have to offer, you’re cost of ownership goes dramatically down. It also has ease and quickness of deployment and simplicity. It’s Excel over the Web, I mean, what gets better than that?”

Frank Pizzolato, CEO and CFO at Clarity Systems, agreed, saying that that many companies are still stuck in the traditional Excel world and often pay the price when they try and expand.

“There are some major enterprises out there that continue to use tools and processes that are outdated,” Pizzolato said.

“Excel seems to be the tool that people are most comfortable with in building a budget, and what happens is they will start with a small Excel model, it gets adopted, and when the company grows to many individuals Excel begins to break down. So the model is great, the collection of data is great, but the tool they’re using is broken because it’s not the right tool.”

Clarity refers to themselves as a niche player in the performance management space. Pizzolato said the first business problem customers want to solve is budgeting, planning, and forecasting, because that process is typically broken in most companies.

He refers to Grand & Toy as the prototypical company for others lagging behind in corporate performance management (CPM) to look to in terms of alignment of business systems.