My name is Joe Scheidecker, and I’m the Accounting Manager for Hankinson Renewable Energy, located in Hankinson, North Dakota (about 60 miles south of Fargo). We manufacture Ethanol and related co-products. We are one of three ethanol plants managed by Guardian Energy Management, in Prior Lake MN. Our other locations are in Janesville, Minnesota and Lima, Ohio.
My first implementation of Prophix was late 2014, at my previous employer, a safety products manufacturer in St. Paul, MN. At that time I was a Senior Accounting Specialist. After implementation and discovering all the great things we could be doing with Prophix, the organization saw the need for a Financial Planning and Analysis role, and after taking the reins of all-things Prophix, I moved into that role shortly thereafter, and subsequently was promoted to FP&A manager after that.
When my family relocated to Fargo in late 2017 and I started working at HRE, the company was using an out-of-the-box Management Reporter for our financial reporting and Excel for budgeting and forecasting. We’ve all heard about or been neck-deep in “Excel hell” and here was no different! I mentioned my experience with Prophix to our Controller and CFO and after further meetings and demos, we implemented in 2019. Since then, our financial reporting, forecasting, and budgeting processes have been much improved and streamlined, and we have gained collaboration among our various locations which was not previously feasible.
Prophix has allowed me to continue to utilize my interest in FP&A for various needs of the company, and my knowledge of the software has helped me to share ideas and implement new reports and processes without the need to go to support for everything. Prophix has given me (and others) confidence in the information we are reporting to our management team and Board of Directors. Variances are easily identified, transactional supporting details are readily available, and we are collaborating like never before!
Congratulations on your success with Prophix -twice over. Just curious -was there anything that you learned or that stood out with the second implementation that you didn’t catch or notice the first time around?
Hi Michelle,
Great question and a tough one to answer, as we’ve done several cool things with Prophix! I’d say most recently what stands out is building a new cube to track chemical usage in our three locations. As an ethanol producer, chemical usage is a large portion of our overall monthly expense, and each site uses a different mix of chemicals for various purposes during the production of our finished products. Previously, our chemical usage tracking was done entirely in Excel with a new spreadsheet being generated for each month. This meant that going back to look for trends and comparing one location to another was very cumbersome, nearly impossible without hours and hours of referencing numerous spreadsheets. We implemented a new process in Dynamics GP to enter in our monthly usage, and pulled this data into Prophix, allowing us to generate usage and cost reports for each location every month. We can quickly compare and analyze usage across our locations and identify anomalies that may require more analysis. Might sound boring to some, but I get a kick out of it!
Hi Ryan,
Thanks! And great questions. I certainly had learnings from our first go-around that helped with the second implementation. First and foremost was, take the time to ensure you have the model designed how you want, capturing all the data that you will need, before you build it out. We built and rebuilt several models in our first implementation because we missed something or another. Not the case the second time. If you take the time to think about what you’re trying to accomplish and what results and data sets you want from your model, it will help ensure you build it right the first time!
Also on a more personal level, at least for me - familiarize yourself with SQL. It’s amazing how far a little knowledge of SQL can get you when it comes to troubleshooting and preparing your data imports into Prophix. When it came time to build our model, I had the SQL queries already written and ready, and while they will likely need a little tweaking by the Prophix team, having it essentially ready to go for them proved to be a substantial time (and $$) savings.
Hi Navin,
We are not utilizing the AI Insight yet. I was amazed to see what it can do, when it was demonstrated during the recent conference though! If I recall correctly though, it works best, or maybe only with D365? We are using GP so I’m not sure we’d be able to capture the full benefit currently. But after seeing it, boy do I want to!
