I'm Kathryn Frosdick,

Group Accountant here at

Brenntag and

I was project manager on the Board implementation.

We have never had a budgeting and planning tool at all,

we have always used Excel, and

it is just a huge,

huge process to go through.

My name is Martin Gratton and I am the Group Finance Director for Brenntag

UK and Ireland, and also for the Multisol Groups. We really needed

something to take us to another level.

We did not just want to get to where we were, we wanted to

to buy a product that was capable of giving us more than we have at the

moment and also making us future proof.

We have got a very bespoke way of reporting.

A lot of other systems that we looked at were already very tailored,

whereas Board - one of the reasons why we went with it -

we could do whatever we wanted.

When I first saw Board,

I was very aware of how visual it was. Board looked like

it was very easy to use,

the graphs look good, the figures that were coming out actually looked good,

which is very different to what we were used to.

I am Ian Meek, Head of Finance and I look after finance!

We chose to work with Simpson Associates simply because they installed Cognos with us,

produced a very good system that went on time and on budget, and by being very robust

and flexible - two things were looking for - they provided good support over the

past decade. They have never let us down, they have some very good people there

and I think without that quality of person

it would have been very difficult.

I am Dan Welbourn,

Group Accountant for Brenntag UK.

The Board project has given us massive time savings.

Previously,

we had four different consolidation systems that Board has allowed us to

consolidate into one package,

which has meant that there is no time delay of waiting for one bit to be completed before you can copy it to the next.

Everything is there at the same time

and you can start work on things simultaneously.

The implementation we have done so far has certainly been successful in taking

a clear full day out of

our quarterly reporting. Where we have benefited most from Board,

and the drill through, is from our two different reporting

structures.

In our old system,

they were completely separate.

You did not know where if one number was in one set of accounts

you did not know where it sat in the other one. With Board,

we can look at either P&L and we can drill straight through to where it is on the other one. Specifically,

where that has benefited is probably in our transportation reporting.

We are very focused at the moment,

being a distribution business, on transportation costs,

so we can now drill into our transport costs and see exactly where they are.

I have seen the confidence grow, in the relevant people, to the extent that they will go off

and design, spec, write, and

demonstrate their own little subsection.

For example,

the top-down, high-level forecast that we do four months into each year,

Kathryn has pretty much done that from scratch herself and presented it to the team who are

more than delighted with it.

We obviously had a look at

several types of software provider when we started

but I think that what we have delivered so far,

and what we can see on the horizon,

we are happy that we have made the right choice. The reasons that we have

set out on this journey also embrace a lot of the changes that they were living with for a very

long time.

So I do think that, particularly now, we are in a very positive part of the

project.

Everything we do now enhances what they are getting out of it.

Obviously,

when you start,

you are putting a lot of effort in to get somewhere

back to where you started.

I think we have gone past that now where we are very much in, what I would call, the glory phase of

the project.