Dynamic project accounting reporting through utilization of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud

Client Background

Mahindra North American Technical Center (NATC) is a part of the $16.9 billion multi-national group Mahindra. Mahindra NATC's automotive product line is focused on 21st century, forward thinking vehicle designs and includes passenger, commercial, and motorsport vehicles.

The Business Challenge

Mahindra’s business runs in a “design-to-development” production environment, which comes with its own unique challenges. Tracking and assessing each project through its life cycle was resulting in a significant spend in resource time to pull, revise and verify data from its Plex Manufacturing Cloud into an Excel spreadsheet.

Mahindra’s accounting team was spending 12+ hours a month to manually manage this pertinent data in offline spreadsheets as they could not get the necessary information from their system. Each hour spent on these non-value add tasks was incurring additional costs in an already expensive production environment.

Mahindra reached out to Baker Tilly to understand and design alternative processes to provide critical project lifecycle information, eliminate their manual processes and reduce spend.

The Baker Tilly Approach

Using their deep understanding of the Plex system modules, the Baker Tilly team leveraged a unique approach in usage of existing data fields and designed a solution that enhanced Mahindra’s current Plex Accounting Job module. The unique approach included:

• Development of an Excel-based model to enable reporting of data through multiple Plex modules and utilization of existing Plex accounting modules.
• Streamlining of Plex Manufacturing Cloud data through custom reports that were based on NATC’s existing financial model.
• Development of new system functionality to eliminate the time-consuming manual data curation.
• Enabling users to create unique accounting jobs to bucket costs and support variance calculations. 
• Delivery of critical data in real-time for improved communication of current project status to key stakeholders.

Business Impact

• Mahindra NATC now has a better understanding of predetermined budgets and actual dollar outcomes
• Achieved a 7.5% increase in value-add employee hours
• Mitigation of project risk with the  ability to visually quantify project performance
• Eliminated delays in project performance report creation as project performance reports are now generated within seconds
• Full accounting functionality in Plex, linking accounting jobs to both customer (AR) and supplier (AP) invoices, as well as journal entries (general ledger).
• Mahindra NATC has enhanced their purchasing decisions through amplified communication throughout the organization

For more information on this topic, or to learn how Baker Tilly specialists can help, contact our team.