eCapital Advisors Case Study: CSM Corporation
About CSM Corporation
CSM Corporation began modestly when 12-year-old Gary Holmes, now CSM’s CEO, started selling light bulbs door to door in Minneapolis. A young entrepreneur, Gary enlisted his Boy Scout troop as a sales force. At age 14, he used his light bulb earnings to buy his first real estate asset - a set of Minneapolis duplexes. In 1976, Gary’s first company, Colonial Apartments became Colonial Services & Management, now CSM Corporation.
Growth continued and CSM Corporation began acquiring, developing and renovating residential, commercial and industrial properties across the country. A one million square foot commercial property portfolio grew to more than eight million by 2008 and the residential portfolio increased to over 4,000 units. In 1992, CSM entered the hotel industry, acquiring and renovating a former Howard Johnson’s into a Country Inn by Carlson. Since then, CSM Lodging has acquired, built and managed 37 hotel properties nationwide. CSM Corporation and CSM Lodging expanded significantly over the years to 1,945 employees today.
Products/Services Purchased:
- Cognos TM1, Cognos BI
- eCapital Advisors services: consulting, implementation, training
Challenge
CSM Corporation has multiple business lines: commercial and retail real estate leasing, parking garages, hotels, restaurants, building maintenance and apartments. Because of their differences, each business line was forecasted separately using hundreds of different measures. Adding to the complexity, some forecasts are done monthly while others are done daily.
All of the forecasting and planning reports were compiled using Excel, which was a very inefficient and inaccurate process. Trying to consolidate the information so that it could be presented to the company’s executives was labor and time intensive. Some reports couldn’t even be produced because of the time required.
CSM Corporation’s leaders knew it was time to stop simply gathering data, and instead to get ahead of the numbers so that they could react in a more timely manner. They needed a platform that made it easy to consolidate and interpret their information.
Strategy
CSM’s Vice President and Controller Chris Fodor had worked with eCapital Advisors in other capacities, including the company’s implementation of Cognos BI, and immediately thought of us for this project. She trusted us to assist in building the models, stabilize the reporting platform, and to get the company on target for completing both its annual budget as well as its 15-month rolling forecast which is completed monthly. By implementing these strategies, she also wanted to reduce the resources dedicated to the company’s budgeting processes.
“I continue to use eCapital Advisors because of their integrity and skill set. They are great partners because they
don’t just play the consulting role. They actually train our staff so that we can support the system long after
the project is done. That’s a unique skill set. A lot of people can build business analytic models, but
they can’t train anyone else to use and maintain them.”
Approach
After deciding to use TM1 as a data source platform and Cognos BI for the reporting, CSM’s financial team worked with eCapital Advisors to create models for each business line and automate their processes. The CSM staff then continued with a staged implementation, building out several of the business models internally. To maximize performance, they later brought eCapital back in to stabilize the platform and simplify the infrastructure.
With its new system in place, CSM can now track their diverse statistical measures that are imported from various databases, and easily generate and/or consolidate actual/ forecast comparisons.
Impact
This implementation is meeting all expectations, and has changed how CSM Corporation does business. With its forecasting and reporting now fully automated using more business rules, the company can access its information much faster and more efficiently than ever before. The increased access to analytics also enables the Finance Department to provide more insights into what the numbers mean, allowing the company to take quicker action as trends are identified.
CSM Corporation continues to use eCapital Advisors in an advisory role to help them maintain its infrastructure, and to determine the best strategies for upgrading its business intelligence solutions to meet its future needs.
