Significant Milestones in Profit ImprovementThe Acorn Story- 1996 -- Acorn was started as a "turn-around" company, leveraging the knowledge and experience of Acorn's founder, Steve Anderson, from his studies and services at Harvard Business School and McKinsey. The company operated as a consulting company for some time before realizing that a big issue with many companies trying to focus on profit improvement is the difficulty in accurately measuring cost and profit across customers, products, suppliers, etc. The company evaluated several off-the-shelf Activity-Based Costing (ABC) systems available at the time but found all of them lacking in the critical functionality needed to deliver sustainable profit improvement at an accurate, root-cause, and enterprise scalable level.
- According to a 2003 study by Ernst & Young and the IMA, 98% of top-level Finance executives believe they receive bad information about corporate costs, particularly about overhead costs.
- 1998-- QuickABC, Acorn's first software solution, was used in over 50 profit improvement projects.
- • Many of these customers asked to keep the software to sustain their ability to drive continual profit improvement.
- • Numerous SMB clients doubled or tripled their Net Operating Profits within one year by taking action on the insight provided by Acorn.
- 2001 -- Acorn received its first round of Venture Capital funding led by its strategic investment partner, Insight Venture Partners. This fueled Acorn's investment in and time to market for its enterprise class software.
- • It was successfully implemented on an enterprise basis within nine months at a Fortune 1000 customer with over 600,000 product SKU's, 1,000,000 monthly transaction line items, over 20,000 suppliers and over 300,000 customers.
- • For the first time, this customer had visibility into the net profits of EVERY customer, EVERY transaction, EVERY product, EVERY supplier and more, in one easy-to-maintain model that validates to the financial record of their business, the GL.
- • This client credits millions of dollars in annual profit improvements to the actions taken on the insights provided by Acorn's solution.
- 2003 -- Acorn won a highly competitive project with a Fortune 1000 financial services company, which shortened their cycle time by 90% and enabled $600 million in cost savings.
- • This project required performance visibility into over 7 million accounts and included channel performance, segment performance, product performance and capacity analysis throughout the organization.
- • Acorn delivered a solution that contributed to billions of dollars in shareholder value improvements over a two-year period.
- Acorn received its second round of Venture Capital funding, led by it's strategic investment partners Insight Venture Partners and Austin Ventures. This funding enabled Acorn to increase its field operations and configure its offerings for different industries.
- 2004 -- Acorn added functionality above and beyond the core application's ability to measure revenues, costs, profits, and capacity utilization, including:
- • Economic Profit and EVA analysis (in partnership with Stern Stewart).
- • Pure cost and process performance analysis (for non-profit organizations).
- • Improved functionality for the needs of Global 2000 clients, including enhancements in scalability, security, usability, and ease of maintenance.
- 2005 -- Acorn won a highly competitive and extremely complex project at a large Fortune 100 retailer, which provided them with enterprise visibility into the revenues, costs, profits, and capacity utilization of every customer segment, at every store, for every product SKU, through every process, from every vendor, and across all resources (including people and capex).
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Acorn launched an enhanced and robust suite of products, including Acorn Performance Analyzer®, Price Analyzer and Acorn Advanced Analytics.
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Acorn was selected by Microsoft to be a Nationally Managed ISV, a prestigious honor extended to less than 110 of over 70,000 ISV's.
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A Fortune 1000 software company chose Acorn's application on an OEM basis to complete their profitability solution offering to Tier 1 - 3 financial service institutions, validating Acorn's Best-of-Breed offering.
- 2006 --
- • Acorn added additional Fortune 1000 and International marquee customers such as FedEx,
American Express, PNC, Coca Cola, T1 Automotive, and Deutsche Bank.
- • Acorn launched its first formal OEM relationship with SunGard Bancware who materialized the solution with numerous Bancware clients.
- • Acorn replaced our industry competitors at large companies such as PNC and FedEx. Meanwhile, Acorn continued its 100% track record of never being replaced by a
commercially available competitor in our installed client base.
- • Acorn achieved "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" status as an SAP Partner.
- • Acorn customers realized over $1Billion in annual profit improvements enabled by our solution.
- • Acorn teamed with numerous Private Equity firms to perform pre-deal due diligence and to create profit-based turnaround plans for targeted
companies in the consumer products industry.
- 2007 and Beyond...
- • Acorn released its first SAP xApp - Price Check.
- • Acorn Performance Analyzer® application was selected by IBM's Financial Service,
Global Business Consulting practice as a best-of-breed component for their IT Value Based Analytics (ITVBA) solution.
- • SAP announced a Global reseller agreement enabling SAP to integrate with, market and sell "SAP BPM by Acorn" as the Profitability
Management Solution for SAP’s customers on a standalone basis and as an integral component of their CPM Suite offering.
- • Acorn achieved 24 consecutive quarters of successful client implementations.
- • Acorn teamed with a Private Equity firm to identify and capture continual profit improvements
in its newly acquired portfolio company in the consumer products industry.
- Throughout our history, we have focused on helping our customers improve their profits. This remains our mission as we expand our customer base into the Global 2000, our geographic reach across the globe, the markets we serve, and our total Performance Management solution offering. We remain passionate about constantly improving our solution to better enable this mission.
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- We ultimately met with 20 of our largest accounts... Fifteen agreed to renegotiate the way we serve them, which doubled our operating profits in
- one year.
- Dave Deinzer, CEO
Denman Davis
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