Aterian (NASDAQ: ATER) is a technology-enabled consumer products platform that builds, acquires and partners with e-commerce brands. They operate in over 12 countries and support over 2,000 products with annual revenue over $200MM.
Business Challenges
- Lacking Scalability – Current business process became unsustainable. Google Sheet workbooks caused a bottleneck in the financial planning process; too large to manage, too long to update and too prone to inherent errors
- Product Granularity – Business identified the need for the ability to analyze down to SKU level while maintaining holistic overview of inventory planning
- On-Demand Cash Flow Management – Exponential growth and the nature of business industry requires the ability to consistently and accurately track cash flow
Solution
- Process Configuration – New method developed for managing inventory flow; calculating re-orders of products based on SKUs, sales forecasts and vendor details
- Business Vertical Standardization – Finance and Operations business verticals are now able to ingest standardized Anaplan outputs
- Weekly Reporting – Created a report for calculating gross margin to make timely decisions for the intersection of strategic operations and finance
Impact
- Version Modeling – Previous versioning process took upwards of one day at the beginning of each week, but is now automated utilizing Anaplan’s functionality
- One Source of Truth – Merged data sources from different software into the Anaplan platform allows for significant improvements in data depth and breadth
- Tracking Cash Flow – Adaptive models allow end users to consistently view snapshots of cash flow and its trajectory
