Customer story · Eutraco
Eutraco consolidates its 7 entities and moves beyond Excel with EMASPHERE
Founded in 1967, family-owned carrier Eutraco (400 semi-trailers) replaced its Excel reporting with EMASPHERE to consolidate its seven European entities.
About Eutraco
Eutraco is a transport company founded in 1967 by the Lievens family. The third generation is now at the wheel of this European heavyweight, whose fleet of 400 semi-trailers is recognizable by the green eagle emblem and the name that have remained unchanged since the family business was founded. In half a century, the Eutraco group has also become synonymous with a wide range of logistics solutions.
With targeted international ambitions, the group invests in providing “sustainable and tailored” solutions to its business partners. The management team sees “reliability and adaptability” as the “best guarantees of success” for the company. Eutraco focuses in particular on performance monitoring and digitalization, so it can react quickly to changing circumstances and remain a trusted carrier and logistics partner.
Two new challenges: consolidation and moving beyond Excel
Eutraco’s growth has accelerated in recent years with several acquisitions, the opening of a second office and several logistics sites in different countries. Amid this large-scale transformation, group management faced two new challenges: consolidating its various entities, and finding an alternative to Excel to produce solid, accurate financial reports with ease, as these had until then been built manually in spreadsheets.
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Having compared it with other solutions on the market, we found EMASPHERE’s offer competitive, and it meets our performance and efficiency needs on every point.
Kristof Callens
Finance Director · Eutraco
Efficient reporting that saves resources
“All the accounting is done in-house,” explains Kristof Callens, Finance Director. “We use the topACCOUNT software package (Wolters Kluwer) and, until recently, Excel to analyze our data and build financial reports. However, as the group made acquisitions and grew, working in Excel files became very demanding for the management team,” he adds.
“As our reporting needs kept growing, the Excel files became exponentially slower at taking in new data, and ended up as an accounting tool that was complex to use and to read.”
The finance director continues: “Today we generate more and more data, and with business intelligence in mind, we naturally want to integrate it further into our business model.” Without reliable reporting, says Serge Gregoir, the group’s CEO, “it is hard to make consistent choices and take the strategic decisions needed in time to maintain our levels of performance and profitability.”
“To stop depending on manual reporting,” explains Kristof Callens, “and to make sure we have reliable data at all times, we looked into EMASPHERE. The platform demo impressed us with how resource-efficient it is and what it can do, from data handling and display to how easy the tool is to use overall.”
Implementation delivered on time
The analytics for the group’s different activities required a lot of attention. EMASPHERE’s prior knowledge of the transport and logistics sector was put to good use, and the implementation was delivered on time.
Consolidated management and greater efficiency
The Eutraco group is made up of seven entities across Europe, including four legal entities, all of which are now on the EMASPHERE financial platform. In the consolidation work carried out by the EMASPHERE and Eutraco teams, the priority was to set up profit and loss by month and by year (a daily or even real-time frequency is not ruled out either). The same view can also be applied to vehicle types (curtainsiders, refrigerated trucks, tractor units...), storage spaces and more, so the company can react as quickly as possible to “unusual” figures. The aim is to optimize the different entities and achieve, for example, better information sharing between the transport and logistics divisions.
“The more ‘predictable’ the figures are across the different parts of our business,” the management team says, “the better we can ensure efficient operations and strengthen our reputation.”
So far, the management teams (CEO, Finance, Purchasing, Transport, HR and other managers) and middle management use EMASPHERE. Its mobile app is especially popular, not least with the finance director, who checks it every day. In the near future, around 50 people in total are expected to have access to the platform. Eutraco’s recently published corporate strategy includes, alongside an “ambitious growth plan”, a “complete integration of the group” by 2025.
Eutraco’s management is strongly committed to digitalization. Driven by Serge Gregoir, an in-house team has been set up to guide the company through its digital transformation.
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