Since 1980, Pampered Chef has been a Food Retail company dedicated to providing cooking tools to give people more confidence in the kitchen, as well as recipes that help families enjoy mealtimes together, and a business opportunity for its consultants.
About the Company
As a household name for nearly four decades, it’s imperative for the technology stack for such a longstanding and robust business like Pampered Chef to be up to par. As such, in order to maintain top standards that align to a rapidly digitizing retail industry, IT decision makers within the office of the CFO recognized a need to upgrade their financial processes and software in order to maintain a competitive advantage. With goals to improve sub-ledger reconciliation and financial month end close, the company turned to AWS Redshift as their solution of choice, and long-time AWS partner and experts, Apps Associates, to support and guide the implementation for ultimate success.
Introduction
In upgrading their financial software solution, Pampered Chef aimed to not only reconcile variances between cash receipts and bank statements, as well as sub-ledger data, they also aimed to proactively identify issues with unrecognized revenue—something their existing solution was not capable of. Knowing they needed a partner with the right experience to not only implement the AWS Redshift software but one who could also ensure it was meeting the company’s unique business needs once implemented, they turned to Apps Associates. As an AWS Partner since 2012 and APN Premier Consulting Partner since 2016, Apps’ experience with over 350+ workload migrations set them apart as the obvious choice for making this project come to life.
With dashboards built on MicroStrategy, Apps experts led the project for all financial reporting as it related to Sales, Inventory and Cash Management applications. And thanks to dashboard configurations and reports within the new system, Apps was also able to help the company capture unrecognized revenue and variances in sub-ledger reconciliation in order to provide a more complete picture of the company’s financial data. What’s more, Apps experts leveraged transactional details from sales in order to support aggregate variances and aging KPI’s so that no source of revenue or financial data was left unaccounted for. Now equipped with the capabilities to capture a complete 360-degree view of their financial data, Pampered Chef is set up for continued long-term success.
Approach for Financial Reconciliation
Following the migration to AWS Redshift, Pampered Chef’s financial data saw measurable results across the board. Their new solution provided a scalable environment that was able to handle larger volumes of data, while also enabling faster data retrieval for enhanced reporting performance. Additionally, thanks to Apps help in the identification of variances across the different sub ledgers and across the following areas, users now saw a streamlined process that reduced the amount of time it typically took to close the monthly financial books:
- Inventory
- Payables
- Receivables
- Cash Management
With the implementation of the AWS Redshift solution, Pampered Chef was able to tap into previously unrecognized revenue and provided detailed variance analysis along each step of the Order to Cash process, including:
- Orders Shipped
- Revenue Recognized
- Cash Remitted
- Revenue Distribution
- Commercial Sales Reconciliation
Equipped with the right tools for financial success, Pampered Chef is ready to keep providing the quality products to their customers as they’ve done since 1980.
Key Benefits
About Apps Associates
Apps Associates is an enterprise application services leader with a customer-first focus. For more than two decades IT decision makers have turned to Apps Associates for strategic counsel, system integration and the services required to solve their most complex business and digital transformation challenges.