Financial Forecasting Software

The part-book is a financial forecasting software solution for automotive suppliers

The Part-Book is Financial Forecasting software that was designed and built for Automotive Suppliers.  The Financial Forecasting feature of the Part-Book enables you to see more than just the top-line revenue provided by a sales forecast, and beyond the short-term forecast provided by EDI and an ERP/MRP system, in a fraction of the time it traditionally takes with the spreadsheet method. 

The Part-Book is a Program, Part and Project Management system that’s driven by a custom engineered Bill-of-Materials (BOM) and Operations, so it governs the data for current production parts, plus it facilitates quoting new business and managing engineering changes.  The Part-Book is the system of record for all program, part and project related information, so it knows the cost and price of every part, at every level, including each option or scenario that’s been considered.  The Part-Book has all of the information needed to generate a fully automated financial forecast and it does just that, without the need to chase data around spreadsheets.

     Not only does the Part-Book automatically generate a financial forecast, it has the ability to capture the multiple iterations of the cost and quote model as they change over time, while providing clear visibility of the complete financial forecast and history by customer, program, and part, including the ability to easily model multiple options and scenarios and then compare them side by side to uncover underlying risks and opportunities. 

With the Part-Book you’ll have better insight and more accurate financial data than you can get with other systems and spreadsheets, because the information is in real-time, your not limited to looking at financial analysis based purely on what’s theoretically supposed to happen, or standard cost; and your not dependent on people manually moving data or transferring knowledge instantly.  

What makes the Part-Book Financial Forecasting software for automotive suppliers unique?  With the Part-Book you’ll be able to easily capture the unique cost drivers for each item in the BOM (bill of materials).  The variables used in calculating the cost of plastic are different than steel; and quoting a casting is different than quoting a forging, metal stamping, plastic injection molded part, or machined component.  The Part-Book captures the unique attributes for each item in the BOM; and it enables the user to see and drill into the details.

The Part-Book Financial Forecast report can be run with varying options, including by Customer / Program / Customer Location / Company Location / Product Type.  You can run a 1, 5 or 10 year report, based on quoted, planned or actual volumes.  Once the report has been been ran it can be dumped to Excel with the click of a button, then sliced, diced and shared as needed.  Using the Part-Book for Financial Forecasting is kind of similar to what automotive supplier do today, except with accurate, up-to-date information that is maintained by a database; and without the mind numbing task of moving lots of data from one spreadsheet to another, or depending on people to consistently transfer knowledge and updates when things change.

 There are many problems with spreadsheets.  Repeated studies have found that between 80 – 90% of spreadsheets have errors, even after careful review.  Spreadsheets can only be used by one person at a time.  If you’ve ever tried to fully understand the logic, formulas and values on a complex spreadsheet that was created by someone else then you know how difficult that can be.  When we don’t fully understand the information in a spreadsheet we don’t trust it, so we don’t use it – what we do instead is create more spreadsheets, then store them with loosely controlled file names and folders; and the cycle repeats.  If you’re not convinced that spreadsheets don’t work, you can read a story from CIO about 8 of the worst spreadsheet blunders here.

The Part-Book is the ideal Financial Forecasting software solution for automotive suppliers.  And with the gold version of the Part-Book you’ll get Part-Book Insights™, where we leverage Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) to create beautiful dashboards and customized reports that provide clear visibility of key metrics with actionable items that helps automotive suppliers measure performance while providing insight and awareness that drives a culture of continuous improvement.