"Monarch has saved us substantial time, paper and printing costs, and hassles. Monarch's simple but powerful report mining and business intelligence makes it a winner for any distribution organization."

 

Russell Sigler, Inc. (dba Sigler & Reeves), based in Phoenix, is a wholesale distributor of Carrier air conditioning equipment and parts in the Southwest US, with sales exceeding $100 million. Judging from Russell Sigler's success with Monarch, distributors seeking a strong boost in company productivity and efficiency need look no further than Monarch, as the right place to get started.

"The versatility of Monarch as a data analysis tool has been a big help to us," says Andy Abbott, Assistant Controller for Russell Sigler. "Whatever reports we throw at it, we get back accurate data and improved efficiency in how we work with data. Monarch enables us to address business issues we wouldn't have had time to resolve otherwise."

Andy uses Monarch to transform the company's mainframe reports into live data for a wide variety of projects. "Right out of the box, Monarch saved us 45 minutes per day in manual data entry," Andy says. "We must provide our bank with receivables and inventory information, updated on a daily basis. We had been manually entering the data from multiple mainframe reports into a spreadsheet. Instead, we used Monarch to mine the data from several different A/R and inventory reports into one Excel worksheet. With Monarch, our bank gets the data it needs immediately, and we get back precious man-hours we can use to work on important business issues."

Monarch has helped Russell Sigler even further within its banking-related workload. "Monarch is a great tool for account reconciliation," Andy says. "With Monarch, we open a detailed AR report then filter by bank and summarize by batch number. These totals by batch are what match the individual deposits on our bank statement."

"Monarch also helps expedite our payroll processing. We use 'positive pay', in which our bank will clear only specified checks. With Monarch, we extract data from our payroll register then, using Monarch's calculated fields, add some additional data that the bank requires. Monarch produces a payroll data file that is exported directly to the bank, saving us from even more manual data entry."

Monarch plays a role in Russell Sigler's operations as well. "I use Monarch for inventory analysis," Andy says.

"Monarch makes it easy to identify non-moving and slow-moving inventory within each branch. We use the Monarch Summary feature to generate inventory turns, inventory weeks supply on hand, and more. This is all accomplished without programming; Monarch lets us work with the data buried within our mainframe reports."

Still another area in which Monarch has helped Russell Sigler is in sales analysis. "Monarch makes it easy to transform a sales report into a sales force performance ranking by sales dollars or sales margin," says Andy. "Monarch is also used to calculate sales commissions. I created calculated fields in Monarch to generate the right commission amounts, and save them in the Monarch model template for easy reuse again and again."

Even sales collections are expedited using Monarch. "Our mainframe system is limited in how we can display our receivables data," says Andy. "But with Monarch, we can easily extract the data from our aged trial balance, and summarize the data by credit territory. This enables us to produce data tailored for each of our credit personnel, so they can follow up on overdue accounts quickly."

"Monarch makes it easy to transform a sales report into a sales force performance ranking by sales dollars or sales margin. Monarch is also used to calculate sales commissions. I created calculated fields in Monarch to generate the right commission amounts, and save them in the Monarch model template for easy reuse again and again."

Russell Sigler completed a successful acquisition. The acquired company used a different enterprise business system, but Andy used Monarch to convert that company's sales reports into a common format using Monarch. "Monarch made consolidated reporting between the two systems easy, and without database programming," says Andy.

Even Carrier Corporation is benefiting from Russell Sigler's use of Monarch. "Carrier, whose products we distribute, requested we sort our reporting of invoices we pay to Carrier in a certain manner," Andy explains. "One A/P check from us may cover a twenty page list of Carrier invoices. Monarch to the rescue: we extract the details from our A/P check register and sort the invoice details to Carrier's specifications. It's easy!"

"Monarch has saved us substantial time, paper and printing costs, and hassles," Andy adds. "Monarch has accomplished everything from automating tedious administrative tasks to shedding new light on our inventory and sales data," Andy adds. "Monarch's simple but powerful report mining and business intelligence makes it a winner for any distribution organization."

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