How Cumming Group Reduced Its Budgeting Time by Half

Cumming Group deployed Vena Solutions to modernize its accounting and financial close capabilities. The firm was able to overhaul its budgeting and reconciliation processes. Vena Solutions also enabled Cumming Group to refine its onboarding and spending policies. Since deploying Vena Solutions, Cumming Group has substantially grown and, as a result, has expanded its finance team’s role to optimize hiring opportunities and provide rolling forecasts.

The Company

Cumming Group is an international project management and cost consulting firm that provides insight into construction projects for industries including education, healthcare, and hospitality. The firm has hundreds of assignments underway at any given time and works on projects around the world for a diverse pool of high-profile customers.

The Challenge

Cumming Group had previously been conducting its financial operations entirely on spreadsheets. Its business processes were prone to errors due to the large number of people independently interacting with the data. Significant pain points included manually aggregating data during budgeting periods and maintaining template integrity across dozens of users. Lack of data security also posed a risk to the company as there were no controls over the viewing privileges for different projects.

The company needed a centralized corporate performance management (CPM) solution to better coordinate its projects and plans for future growth. By automating data collection and verification, Cumming’s finance team could refocus its efforts towards planning and strategic work for the company.

The Strategy

Cumming Group began its search for a modern CPM vendor in early 2014 and considered a wide variety of options including Axiom EPM, Adaptive Insights, BI 360, Host Analytics, and Vena Solutions. Cumming chose Vena Solutions for a variety of reasons, including the following key differentiators:

• Familiarity

  Cumming Group anticipated that converting its employees to a new CPM solution would be the biggest obstacle to modernizing its finances and thus narrowed its search to vendors that based their offerings on Microsoft Excel’s UI. Vena Solutions delivered modern CPM capabilities that Cumming Group needed within a familiar front-end interface, allowing Cumming’s employees to preserve their previous skill investments in the software.

• Flexibility

  The finance work surrounding Cumming’s global portfolio of consulting projects requires a large amount of collaboration between corporate finance and individual project consulting teams. With aggressive growth in the company’s future, the new CPM solution needed to address a greater volume of projects and their impact on the bottom line. Vena Solutions demonstrated the scalability that Cumming Group needed and has since managed the company’s growing complexity without any problems.

“Citrin Cooperman has developed processes for Cumming that enabled real-time control of a sprawling and rapidly growing company that was a major reason for the bottom line to improve with over 25% CAGR on revenue through organic and acquisitive growth. For us Citrin Cooperman is not a short end result, the power of data and the need to use it meaningfully has been part of Cumming's DNA; Citrin Cooperman has been able to take that critical need and make it on demand and hugely valuable. The impact to enterprise value through improved metrics is massive, probably 20% of EV." 
– FINLAY CUMMING. CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, CUMMING GROUP

Key Benefit Areas

• Increased employee productivity

  With Vena Solutions, Cumming Group streamlined its data collection and governance processes. As a result, the finance and operations teams refocused their efforts to more meaningful work for the company’s planning and daily activities.

• Increased budgetary efficiency

  By eliminating the many touchpoints for Cumming’s financial data, Vena Solutions enabled Cumming’s financial team to gradually reduce its budgeting process to half its previous length. Budgets are now completed every three months and contribute to the rolling forecasts made over the course of every year. The budgets are also more accurate due to new data security controls.

• Organizational changes

  Once deployment, non-finance Cumming employees have begun to leverage Vena Solutions in a rising number of situations outside of planning and budgeting. Cumming Group also implemented new hiring and spending policies to eliminate costs and increase efficiency.

Key Cost Areas

The largest cost area of the Cumming Group deployment was the initial purchase and consulting for the implementation of the Vena Solutions software. Other cost areas over the three-year period included the annual subscription charges for Cumming users, and employee time spent being trained on the new system.

Working with Citrin Cooperman

Cumming Group and Citrin Cooperman developed an aggressive plan to make significant upgrades based on both the COO and CEO needing better and quicker data. The scope of work Citrin Cooperman developed was very comprehensive allowing the entire Cumming team to get behind it. To the day, Cumming and Citrin Cooperman maintain a partnership and are constantly improving and optimizing processes. Thanks to the partnership that has been built, Cumming Group keeps growing and being a top leader in its industry.

"Citrin Cooperman is unique where it harnesses software implementation with an innovative and very smart business mind that is chameleon and who can adapt to each business’ particular challenges and opportunities. Citrin Cooperman is on a long-term consulting agreement with us and just go above and beyond in their delivery and innovation. For anyone wanting to use Citrin Cooperman to its full potential I recommend you trust them, treat them as a partner in business solutions and together you will end up much better than you were before."
– FINLAY CUMMING. CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, CUMMING GROUP