IAA Success Story
Overview
IAA is a leading global digital marketplace connecting vehicle buyers and sellers. Leveraging leading-edge technology and focusing on innovation, IAA’s unique platform facilitates the marketing and sale of total-loss, donation, commercial, and consumer-facing vehicles. Headquartered in the greater Chicagoland, IAA has over 4,500 employees and 250 facilities throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and serves over 170 countries. IAA offers sellers a comprehensive suite of services aimed at maximizing vehicle value, reducing administrative costs, shortening selling cycle time, and delivering the highest economic returns. As IAA continues to grow, they needed accounting and finance tools to support their budgeting, forecasting and account reconciliation processes while removing the challenges of spreadsheets. The future solution needed to be scalable, auditable, and able to reduce the need for manual intervention.
Business Challenge
As a growing company that had just gone public, IAA needed a solution not limited by spreadsheets. They needed a scalable, reliable, and auditable platform that could be automated with minimal IT involvement. Integration with Great Plains and detailed margin data was a manual process of downloading and linking over 450 files. Distribution of the budget was very time consuming, especially when last minute changes occurred. Planning was always done at a detailed level. To meet the needs of an ever-changing economy, IAA needed a solution that also offered detailed forecasting. Account reconciliations were all in spreadsheets and difficult to maintain in a repeatable fashion, while all reporting was all done through manual consolidations of spreadsheets.
Solutions
IAA and StratAlyze Solutions implemented Oracle’s cloud-based Planning and Account Reconciliation (EPBCS and ARCS) to improve and scale their finance and accounting processes with a world-class solution. Planning and now Forecasting are both all driver based on history and macro assumptions down to the week, branch, and provider, giving IAA insights into their business to make more informed decisions. Planning by employee and roles of employees gave IAA visibility to the most critical parts of the business and the flexibility to grow that workforce as needed. Moving the Account Reconciliation process to Oracle’s solution gave accounting the flexibility to integrate directly with Great Plains and put controls in place for a more formal review of the reconciliation process.
Result
Since implementing Oracle’s cloud-based Planning and Account Reconciliation solutions, IAA has been able to obtain better insight into the business, scale as the company grows, and eliminate the challenges of spreadsheets. The time to complete the forecast and budget has been greatly reduced and has provided better collaboration across the business. IAA has achieved real-time analytics and the ability to slice and dice their data across any component needed such as branches, regions, providers, and types of providers. With Oracle’s cloud base solution, there is a single version of the truth providing reliability to the data. Oracle’s technology and StratAlyze’s experience has given IAA a dynamic solution that can adapt to the changes of a dynamic economy for years to come.
'With the Oracle tool, IAA continues to grow without fear of falling behind in Budgeting, Forecasting, and Reporting functions. The tool provides visibility into all aspects of performance while maintaining data integrity. The StratAlyze team guided our rollout, from visioning through implementation, providing valuable insight every step of the way."