Audio Research Amplifies Financial Insights with Alight
Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that the finance team at Audio Research, one of the oldest continually operating manufacturers in American audio, is expanding the use of Alight Planning to the Alight Enterprise edition.
Audio Research is one of the oldest continually operating manufacturers in American audio. The company was founded in 1970 with one goal in mind: to advance the state-of-the-art in music reproduction. Today, Audio Research remains a performance-oriented company by philosophy and design. While the company has grown steadily over the last quarter-century, the company recently began evaluating opportunities for strategic growth initiatives. In 2008, David Onan was selected to head up finance as Chief Financial Officer.
“I was talking to a peer about budgeting and forecasting who had looked at various products and came across Alight and liked it.” Said Onan, “At Audio Research, we take our forecasting pretty seriously beginning with the sale of product which drives required resources such as labor and inventory materials we need. We go on to forecast inventory, and we have other key drivers for people, engineering, and sales. We’ve used Excel to build this up, but we got to the point where only I could really use the Excel model, since no one else really could use the Excel model.”
Aidan Mitchell, Alight Director of Client Services, collaborated with David during the initial model development in Alight. “Right from the start, I knew the model would be a success. David wanted an agile planning model that maximized insights while reducing the errors inherent in spreadsheets. It was important to quickly slice and dice the financial statements by product line, product type, product family, and so on. The key to making the project a value-add experience was the additional requirement to do real-time testing on how various strategies or acquisitions would impact profitability and cash.”
“I feel so much better knowing that the Alight model is now up and running. Getting the plan out of spreadsheets and into Alight enables me to focus on the strategic work I need to be doing as a CFO.” Onan said, “We require the integrity of a structured budget program to assist with running multiple scenarios and consolidating companies. The maintenance of the model, importing actuals, creating variance reports, and doing what-if analysis is now an efficient process. We can now quickly run rolling-12 month forecasts along with the baseline budget and actuals across the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow. As well, I have immediate visibility into resource requirements as they relate to the drivers. As we grow our organization through acquisitions such as Wadia, we will continue to expand our use of Alight to support our growth.”
About Audio Research
Audio Research is one of the oldest continually operating manufacturers in American audio. The company was founded in 1970 in Minneapolis with one goal in mind: to advance the state-of-the-art in music reproduction. Today, Audio Research remains a performance-oriented company by philosophy and design. New product introductions are driven only by genuine advances in technology and performance -- the HIGH DEFINITION® that is the hallmark of the company's products. The company has grown steadily over the last quarter-century, with a network of top audio specialist retailers across North America and country-by-country distributors throughout Europe, Asia and South America. The company occupies a 48,000 square-foot, technically-advanced production plant and administrative headquarters in Plymouth, Minnesota, where approximately 50 technical, assembly and support staff guide the product line from concept to finished goods.
About Alight LLC
Alight LLC’s Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 200 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pittsburgh Mercy, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.
