Project - Review Costing, set Standard Costs, Re-create Cost and Margin Sheets, and Rebuild Financial Reports

Costing Effort

The ERP had been neglected - many reports were generated by external sources. In attending general regular meetings (various departments) and reviewing the WIP Variance, Inventory Validation, and Financial Statements, I suspected that the Bills of Materials in the ERP needed to be updated and the GL structure might need adjustment - making me curious about the accuracy of the costing method implementation in the ERP.

Working unsupervised I developed an action plan: tackle items of immediate concern, interview key individuals, create data processing maps, attend various department meetings, and perform a general review of the ERP data. Priorities were based set according to their 'cost to process' and value (impact on daily operations).

Achievements:

• Rebuilt standard financial reports (Income, Cash Flow, SG&A, etc), improving accuracy.
• Rebuilt the Cost Implosion procedure, improving accuracy.
• Improving the alignment of the costing model in the ERP by reviewing: expected direct and indirect salaries (according to standard costs) vs actual payroll data, the work centers (employee rates, and variable and fixed overheads) and Bills of Materials (structures, cycle times, and change-over times).
• Assisted Finance with their general costing efforts and the setting the 2017 and 2018 standard costs in the ERP.
• Reviewed the G/L structure in the ERP and G/L coding procedures and mappings, reducing the need to perform manual adjustments and entries.
• Rebuilt the Bills of Materials (validating item weights and consumption, cycle times, and operations) - and updated the production cards used on the floor.  I ensured uniformity in any shared information across the company.
• Redeveloped prototype and item costing / margin spreadsheets, automating the importing of data from the ERP, improving financial precision to the hundredth of a cent, and simplifying the interface.
• Reviewed the assets in the ERP (history, distribution across legal entities, value, and disposition).
• Worked with Purchasing to update the item costs and last purchase price of all bought out items in the ERP, creating procedures to ensure continued accuracy.

Through these efforts, costs in the ERP came more in-line with expected / anticipated costs as calculated via external systems. The above work efforts helped restore confidence in the financial reports generated by the ERP.

Rebuilding Financial Reports

I worked with Accounting in the review of the double-entry GL structure in the ERP, and to rebuild standard financial reports (Income, Cash Flow, SG&A, etc), improving accuracy and eliminating the need to perform manual adjustments and entries.