Introduction
Vanden Bussche Irrigation is a 70-year-old family-owned Canadian company serving customers in Ontario and areas east. A national leader in a full range of irrigation applications across Agriculture, Residential, Commercial, and Golf markets, Vanden Bussche offers a wide array of irrigation application products and specialized services such as designing irrigation systems and customizing irrigation components.
Challenge
Like many companies with roots firmly in place, Vanden Bussche Irrigation had been operating for decades on legacy systems and long-established practices. Some served the company very well, while others relied heavily on manual processes or specialized knowledge, which eventually started producing operational inefficiencies. Even so, the company’s excellent reputation was matched by continued steady growth and a loyal customer base built over the years.
Few companies have the luxury of relying on practices put into place years ago–including the technology that supports those practices–while continuing to realize the strong results like those that Vanden Bussche achieved. The tides began to turn however when the founding leadership embarked on plans for an eventual exit, passing day-to-day decision-making, operations, and management to the next generation of the Vanden Bussche family. Along with the succession planning came a scrupulous look at the company’s tech stack. The company had recently changed ERP providers, and the BI capabilities were falling short of Vanden Bussche’s sophisticated needs. As the incoming leadership team gradually took the reins around the reporting of KPIs, they experienced an inconsistent and disconnected flow of dashboard data, which impaired their ability to lead the company in a dynamic way.
Solution
Vanden Bussche called on E&A to overhaul their existing platforms and implement a solution that would better prepare them for the robust growth the new team was anticipating. Though their current tech stack hindered a clear view of operational performance, one glaring truth was evident: their processes were far from optimized and were not aligned with best practices. They needed a quick, efficient, and accurate way to answer questions such as: Which of our current mix of strategies and procedures are driving our business forward–and which might be holding us back? Are we sitting on hidden information that could otherwise be used to help us make best practices part of our everyday environment?
From their first look at ProAdvisor, Emily Smith, Controller at Vanden Bussche, realized just how transformative the solution would be. “After just a short period of time during the E&A demo, I knew this was exactly what our team needed” in order to perform and grow in a manner that met the leadership team’s expectations.
Once the implementation was complete, the team gained immediate access to exceptional information-driven decision making that took days, even weeks, to conduct with their old software. And, while they maintained their ability to create their own reports just as they could with their old platform, from day one ProAdvisor also gave them a robust set of pre-built reports–producing analysis and KPIs that helped shift internal behavior towards those best practices that eluded the team in their pre-ProAdvisor days. Clearly, ProAdvisor was the single best answer for discovering how multiple activities interrelated to drive a superior end result–and how these activities relate to Vanden Bussche’s broader company goals.
Results
The incoming leadership team attributes being primed for robust growth to ProAdvisor. “When we brought ProAdvisor on, it really showed us a lot of things we can–and need to–change within the business.” The team is impressed with ProAdvisor’s ease of use and its intuitive nature: it doesn’t require any technical or specialized knowledge to understand, making creating reports and running analyses more efficient for busy executives.
ProAdvisor reports are regularly used for Inventory Control, Sales, and Purchasing to understand and improve operations. The team has already experienced measurable benefits from ProAdvisor including:
Transparency: Reports are used in weekly internal meetings to show their staff insights that identify what the company is doing and where improvements are possible.
Operational Success: Reports created with ProAdvisor have uncovered previously buried intel such as extended lead times from vendors that Vanden Bussche then uses when working with vendors to reduce late shipments.
Process Improvements: ProAdvisor reports have identified where inaccuracies are occurring within processes and supplied insight on how to restructure SOPs to be more effective. For the first time, the Vanden Bussche team was able to immediately identify issues like surplus inventory and take quick action to reduce and manage it.
Time Savings. The time required to prepare reports was slashed not merely by hours, but transformed dramatically—reduced by entire days. ”It’s a huge time saver for the entire finance team.” according to Emily.
The company isn’t the only party that has benefited so strongly from the implementation of ProAdvisor. Because ProAdvisor has been such a game changer with inventory management, Vanden Bussche was able to design and launch a consignment-type program for their high-volume customers, giving customers immediate access to inventory they would otherwise need to access through the normal ordering process. The new program is strengthening the company’s ties with these most valuable customers in ways never before conceived.
Now in a position where they are primed for real growth, the Vanden Bussche team is excited about the possibilities that exist as they continue to integrate ProAdvisor into their operations.
