Unified system brings Clarity to Grand & Toy’s forecasting

From May 2007

By Craig Guillot

Imagine a software solution so comprehensive and integrated that everyone from top executives to commercial sales reps could view any aspect of the company’s performance. By glancing at what looks like the dashboard of a car, they can quickly check the status of hundreds of accounts and measure things like growth, profitability and productivity.

Leading Canadian office products supplier Grand & Toy has been doing just that for years, and company executives say the Clarity Systems software has taken performance management to a whole new level.

As a wholly-owned subsidiary of OfficeMax, Don Mills, Ontario-based Grand & Toy has 26 commercial sales offices, seven distribution centers and more than 50 retail locations. With solid growth and a need to better manage its business, Grand & Toy was on the lookout for more advanced budgeting and finance software.

Clarity 6 from Clarity Systems offers a unified software solution and interface that can deliver business modeling, planning, reporting and forecasting straight to a variety of users with a common look and feel.

Utilizing the program for goal seeking, for instance, a user can enter an earnings-per-share or profit target, and the system will determine the expenses that need to be pared or the revenues that need to be boosted in order to achieve it.

Precise sales forecasting can track quarterly sales by product category and project gross profit margins. “Because it’s a unified product, there are a number of benefits including our ability to model our business around how the customer runs theirs,” says Clarity CEO/CFO Frank Pizzolato.

As a transactions-based company, Grand & Toy takes and distributes thousands of office supply, technology product, paper and office furniture orders per day; approximately 88 percent of the company’s business is with commercial clients.

Performance management has become an integral part of the organization’s operations and almost every department, from finance to the call center, has developed applications with Clarity 6. More than 300 distinct users employ the system every day.

“Our industry is commoditizing so margins are being rationalized all over the place,” says Grand & Toy chief administrative officer John Melodysta. “We have to arrange our business more tightly, and Clarity Performance Management has played a major role in that.”

It certainly has. In fact, Clarity itself was founded in 1995 when Melodysta hired a group of techies to create a data warehouse and reporting solution for Grand & Toy.

In those early days, Grand & Toy was simply looking for a replacement for its internal budgeting and performance management software. In the interim, it learned how Clarity 6 could be used to track and measure everything across the enterprise, including forecasting, planning, reporting, modeling, budgeting, analysis and consolidations.

Scorecard software
Clarity 6 uses “scorecards” to help the company communicate objectives in a visual and measurable manner, monitor performance against those targets and align its tactics with corporate strategy. The balanced scorecard software allows the user to focus on the priorities and look at historical and projected results. Industry standards and measurements can also be imported into the system to measure against the competition.

Grand & Toy used Clarity’s product to launch Defector Detector, a system that allows commercial account managers to keep an eye on their clients. The system tracks how accounts perform, and can alert managers if there is any deviation from normal buying patterns.

“Some of these managers are handling hundreds of accounts and it’s very hard to be on top of all of them every day,” Melodysta says. “Defector Detector serves as an early warning system and gives the manager some sort of insight into how things are going with an account.”

Another Clarity function that Grand & Toy employs is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Reporting application. KPI delivers performance reports in a manner that is clearly understood by different departments and levels of management while allowing comparisons of various metrics across different time periods. The same scoring scale is used across all measurements to create consistent comparisons.

Grand & Toy developed KPI Reporting to track growth, profitability, productivity and satisfaction. On the KPI home page, there are individual gauges to display results for each category, as well as the overall corporate score. Scorecards can break down each indicator’s metrics for month, quarter or year-to-date.

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