Fine food manufacturer Ballantyne was hindered by manual, spreadsheet-heavy budgeting and disjointed pricing review processes. QMetrix implemented a unified Financial Planning and Analysis solution integrated with their ERP, enabling rolling monthly sales forecasting, transparent pricing models, and confident decision-making.
Ballantyne is an Australian family owned company with an 80+ year pedigree in the manufacture and distribution of fine foods. They supply both domestic and international markets.
They operate from their historic head office at Ballantyne Street, South Melbourne, and manufacture at its purpose-built facility at Laverton, Victoria. Ballantyne’s principal activities include production of a range of packaged butter, dairy blend and margarine products, spray dried dairy products, sauces and other portion control packaged products.
The challenge: Outgrowing manual spreadsheets
To support back-office manufacturing, inventory, and sales processes, Ballantyne relied on the Movex ERP (M3). However, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting were handled across multiple disconnected spreadsheets and legacy reporting tools.
Preparing sales forecasts required manual data extraction from M3 into spreadsheets, which were then emailed to sales staff for updates and reassembled manually. This process was:
- Inflexible and time-consuming: High manual effort was required to aggregate inputs across teams.
- Error-prone: Disjointed data increased the risk of discrepancies.
- Lacking visibility: The pricing review process lacked standardised access to data, making it difficult to assess the true bottom-line impact of pricing decisions.
Ballantyne needed a modern Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) framework to close the loop between transactional ERP data and reporting, allowing their leadership team to run “what-if” scenario planning with confidence.
The solution: A unified FP&A system
QMetrix implemented an integrated Financial Planning and Analysis solution designed to streamline forecasting, budgeting, and pricing workflows directly alongside Movex ERP.
Automated sales forecasting
The new system automatically extracts actual sales data from M3 and presents a pre-populated 18-month forecast by customer and product.
- Tailored views: Each salesperson receives a personalised view containing only relevant products and customers.
- Reduced effort: Sales reps only input month-on-month changes rather than building sheets from scratch.
- Instant margin impact: Team members can immediately see how volume shifts impact revenue and gross margin.
- ERP loop closed: Approved forecast data flows directly back into M3 to drive Materials Requirements Planning (MRP).
Streamlined pricing reviews
The pricing engine pulls current product prices and standard costs from M3. Account managers input proposed pricing alongside freight, insurance, and additional logistics costs. Because forecast volumes are integrated into the exact same model, management gains complete transparency into how price changes affect total margin and bottom-line profit.
“It has made the (pricing) process much simpler and incredibly more transparent. It’s a really good tool actually. The system has given us a much more intelligent way to execute a process which is fundamental to good business.”
– Chris Pembrooke, Chief Financial Officer
The impact: Agile, intelligent business operations
By replacing manual spreadsheets with an automated FP&A process, Ballantyne achieved significant operational improvements:
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