Vitro Eliminates Redundancy with Cloud-Based Sage Fixed Assets

CLIENT SUCCESS STORY

Multinational glass producer Vitro partners with Paragon to integrate and migrate their fixed asset data from disparate systems into Sage Fixed Assets, saving an inordinate amount of time, money and resources.

Background

Vitro is a public multinational glass company headquartered in Monterrey Mexico. The company is the largest glass manufacturer in North America and has multiple locations in nine countries throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe.

Challenge

In late 2016, Vitro purchased Pittsburgh Paint’s former flat glass business and in early 2017, Vitro acquired Pittsburgh Glass Works (PGW).

Each acquisition came with a different way of keeping tax and fixed asset records, and each location had different property tax filing deadlines. It was a complex and non-uniform system of record keeping.

Vitro’s challenge was to move their fixed asset accounting data from multiple spreadsheets at multiple locations, to a secure, easily accessible fixed assets management cloud-hosted solution that could be integrated with their SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

“We needed a solution to quickly and easily integrate all of that financial data with our ERP software, and since I had worked with Paragon prior to the acquisition, they were top of mind on finding a solution,” said Jerry Postlethwaite, Vitro’s tax director for the United States and Canada.

Solution

Paragon International, a leading Sage Fixed Assets (SFA) certified business partner, introduced the Sage Fixed Assets—Depreciation Premier solution. Vitro would gain control over the entire lifecycle of its fixed assets, easily modify data to comply with ongoing compliance changes, and access the same data from offices in different countries and states.

Paragon worked with the Vitro team to plan the integration of SFA to SAP and migrate the existing fixed assets records from multiple spreadsheets into the SFA Depreciation application. This included old tax, new tax and GAAP accounting records. “We migrated it all into one place,” said Paragon President Scott Swarts. “One of the PGW companies was running a different SAP software than the others, yet it wanted to follow with the same integration process. We worked together with Vitro’s team to make customized middleware. They were thrilled to integrate their tax and accounting systems with the others.”

“The cloud-based solution allowed us to get up and running immediately,” said Postlethwaite. It would have taken Vitro an inordinate amount of time, money and resources to establish network connections to all locations and to make spreadsheet formats uniform.

“Prior to partnering with Paragon, we had many challenges,” said Postlethwaite. “The timing was tricky and the fixed asset valuation was complex.”

Results

With the Sage Fixed Assets cloud-hosted solution, Vitro can run all of its tax reports and automatically keep up with changes in tax rules that apply to each of their locations. “This allows Vitro to take advantage of the robust tax depreciation and reporting capabilities of SFA,” said Swarts.

It has greatly improved tax, accounting and fixed asset efficiencies. The team can quickly generate tax, depreciation and accounting reports without searching through spreadsheets to manually create reports. Now, the authorized tax and accounting team has access to the same information, whenever or wherever they need it.

“It has saved us a lot of time in doing projects, minimizing our income taxes, and with our financial forecasts and projections,” said Postlethwaite.

It also has saved Vitro money by eliminating redundancy and the need to establish myriad network connections. A single solution is much more cost-effective than maintaining multiple systems.

At the end of the day, Paragon and Sage Fixed Assets with cloud hosting made Vitro’s life a whole lot easier. No more spreadsheets. No more screen shares. No more redundancy.