"I would foresee most organizations benefiting from using Monarch... Some of the reporting now done I could not have achieved in a cost effective and timely manner before Monarch."

 

British-based Brooklyn Motors is a family owned organization founded in 1935 by Mr. W. T. Hill, operating from a wooden garage. The company is now a major dealer for many car brands, including Ford, Mazda, and Toyota, with operations in five counties and employing over 600 people across 16 dealerships.

Just as an adjustable wrench (a "spanner" in British-speak) is an essential tool in the servicing bays at Brooklyn Motors, the company's Group Financial Controller Graham Houlston has been using Monarch software, the IT equivalent of a spanner, for regular data extraction and analysis.

When Graham joined Brooklyn Motors back in 1998 there was a need to extract data from electronically archived reports from a legacy Dealer Management System (DMS) called DARTS, built specifically for car dealerships. After reading an article on Monarch, Graham bought a copy to help him bring the information from the DARTS reports into the company's main financial reporting system. Using Monarch, Graham was able to easily create models to select the relevant data from the reports, and export the data with one click into spreadsheets or databases as required.

Graham comments that the ease of exporting filtered and manipulated data and automating that process is the best feature of Monarch, followed by the simple method where even complete beginners can produce templates and models. Graham was the first person at Brooklyn Motors to use the software, but others have now learned it and couldn't be without it.

"Monarch can be used productively and very quickly, once you have completed the first few tutorials," Graham says. "The trick is to understand what reporting is available from existing systems and having the imagination and vision to use it creatively."

Monarch lends itself to of data transformation tasks in the IT and Finance departments. Graham also uses Monarch to extract trial balances from one dealer management system to import them into another. For example, in 2004, European car brands Skoda and Citroen moved their dealer franchisees onto a new DMS from another system. Using Monarch, Graham was able to mine the right information from reports from the old systems, to help migrate to the new system smoothly and without losing vital data.

Getting the right information to the right decision-maker at the right time is vital for any business, and with compliance issues requiring companies to prove that their financial reporting is not only accurate but demonstrably so, Monarch has helped Brooklyn Motors stay ahead of the game as they draw on the variety of systems already in place.

Many companies (both in Europe and North America), faced with these same challenges, are sometimes urged by vendors to deploy a single costly new solution that incorporates all the existing data sources, but Monarch fits into an organization's existing IT environment without the need for additional hardware or programming resources.

Monarch has given Brooklyn Motors benefits and efficiencies: faster generation of management information, elimination of the need to re-key data, improved accuracy, and the ability to quickly transform report data into spreadsheets ready for end user action.

Graham comments, "I would foresee most organizations benefiting from using Monarch... Some of the reporting now done I could not have achieved in a cost-effective and timely manner before Monarch."

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