Vergeer Kaas wanted to have more grip on the business processes

As a part of reference story for HBSoftware with ExSION, an interview is taken with Hanneke Vergeer of Vergeer Kaas Reeuwijk. See below the article:

Interview with Hanneke Vergeer – Vergeer Kaas Reeuwijk: “We wanted to have better control on the business processes. With ExSION, we get this real-time from the database.”

Profile

Name	Hanneke Vergeer
Company	Vergeer Kaas
Position	Management Accountant
Location Headquarter	Reeuwijk
Navision	2004, version 3.7 (4.0) users ± 50
Supplier	Schouw Informatisering B.V.
ExSION	augustus 2006, 15 users
Activities	Specialized in the riping, cutting, rasping and packing of cheese.

A visit to Vergeer Kaas is surprising. Across small roads, where you would not directly expect trucks with cheese products, you drive to Reeuwijk. In the middle of the polder lies the village, but nothing suggests the presence of a company of Vergeer Kaas's calibre. Getting closer, it becomes clear that the enormous building almost seamlessly merges into the village of Reeuwijk. This is achieved by building a large part beneath the ground level. The complex basically floats on the groundwater. Furthermore, the unsuspecting visitor should not draw a parallel between the company and the rural environment. In fact, Vergeer Kaas is a dynamic hightech company, trend-setting at the market on which she operates, namely the market of riping, cutting, rasping and packaging of cheese.

The company started in 1934 as a trading company. Theodorus Vergeer was selling the cheese that his parents made. After almost 75 years, Vergeer Kaas is still a family company. Diederik Vergeer, son of Leo Vergeer, is currently the CEO and his wife, Hanneke Vergeer, is the management accountant. She is also the hostess for this interview. Around the table are furthermore Peter Verdonk, head of financial administration and Arno Mouwen, CEO of 2-Control. They were actively involved at the deployment of ExSION.

Vergeer Kaas uses Navision since 2004. In the beginning they used Cognos to create management reports, "but the transfer of data during the night was not practical and faulty sensitive," according to Peter Verdonk. "Furthermore, the reports were too static and the usage of the application was very specialistic and not flexible enough. It slowly dissapeared to the background, by which also our grip on the business processes decreased." An unwanted situation, according to the management. That is the reason why Hanneke was approached. She has already worked for six years at one of the four big accountants organizations.

“My assignment was to gain insight in the operational processes and the financial impact of these processes, and to compare this with the way Navision was set up.” In these days, Hanneke had regular contact with Arno Mouwen, who was doing the evaluation and implementation of the authorizations in Navision.
2-Control, the company of Arno, is an enthusiastic ExSION Partner and Arno had her quickly convinced of the possibilities of ExSION Reporting.

“ExSION was actually really quick in use”, continues Hanneke Vergeer, “I myself started in March and in August, directly after the installation, we transformed most of the Cognos models so we had really quick operational ExSION-reports. Now we create the most varying reports with ExSION: the balance sheet and profit-and-loss account, sales reports per customer - articles per kg, turnover and margins - and also many ad-hoc reports, because with Excel you can browse the entire database with ExSION and download data to your worksheet within seconds ."

ExSION Analysis
Nonetheless, Hanneke was confronted with a problem that mainly ExSION users with large data files face. When she wanted to create an overview with 200 articles and 2000 customers, the file became too big for Excel. Fortunately, Arno Mouwen knew about ExSION Analysis, a relatively simple way to reduce big files to a for Excel workable number of lines. Arno explains: "ExSION Analysis is a smart way to compress large amounts of data with the help of the Navision Module Analysis View and to make this data available for ExSION. This availability is comparable with a cube from a business intelligence system (BI). Data can be combined and presented in all kinds of ways. The necessary data for the reports is automatically "prepared" by ExSION Publisher, so the end-users do not have to worry about that." “Arno and an ExSION-consultant had the problem solved within óne day," according to Hanneke Vergeer. "It is also easier then BI because every Excel user can work with it."

It is obvious that at Vergeer Kaas, ExSION Reporting has gained an useful place in the organization. Now, there is more time to optimize the processes and to gain more insight in the company by analyses. As supplier, it is nice to be able to contribute to such a piece of Dutch glory, because that is the category of companies in which Vergeer Kaas belongs.