Industrial manufacturing
Brennick Components
A precision-parts maker replaced a Monday spreadsheet with a forecast it can defend to its lenders.
Group
17 entities · 9 banks · 5 currencies
Country
Germany
Backtest
Inside range · error 3.6 %
The setup
Brennick Components makes machined parts for pumps and drive systems in nine plants across Germany, Poland, Czechia, Mexico and the United States. Seventeen legal entities bank with nine institutions, and until last year the group treasury lived in a workbook with fifty-eight tabs that Anneliese Brandt and one analyst rebuilt every Monday morning.
The workbook was accurate on Monday and out of date by Wednesday. Plants in Mexico and Poland paid suppliers in dollars and zloty from accounts the workbook only saw at month end, and a covenant test with the group’s lenders depended on a minimum liquidity of €6.5M that nobody could confirm during the week.
Backtest · forecast vs actual · 13 weeks
6.4 days
Faster month-end cash close
€1,846,300
Of idle balance moved out of low-yield accounts in the first quarter
±2.4 %
Average forecast error at the 8-week mark, measured over 26 weeks
“
I used to send the board a number on Monday and spend the week explaining it. Now I send the range, and nobody asks me to defend the middle of it.
Anneliese Brandt
Group Treasurer
What changed
Brennick connected its bank statements and its SAP payment proposals to Headroom over two afternoons. The first forecast already showed what the workbook could not: the low point of the quarter fell in the second week of December, when a tooling invoice of $892,440 and the annual bonus run landed within four days of each other. The cone put the chance of touching the covenant floor in a range, not a yes or a no.
Treasury now moves surplus from the Polish and Czech accounts into the German pool on a schedule it can explain. The analyst who rebuilt the workbook builds scenarios instead, and the lenders receive the forecast with its range attached. Month-end close is 6.4 days faster, and the Monday meeting is twenty minutes shorter.
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