Reduced month-end reporting from days to just minutes
Centralized data from 6 ERP instances for consolidated reporting and variance analysis
Gained real-time visibility into EBITDA, sales, and margins across 60+ locations
The Challenge: Moving Beyond Reactive Finance
As a growing mid-market industrial distributor with over 60 locations across North America, LGG Industrial needed a more agile FP&A process. Their legacy system, Prophix, couldn’t keep up, with no real-time data connectivity, limited flexibility for Excel-based workflows, and time-consuming manual uploads during month-end close.
“We live in Excel,” says Lauren Rader, Director of FP&A at LGG Industrial. “Prophix wasn’t user-friendly and didn’t connect to our ERPs. It bogged down the accounting team during closing, and there was no easy way to model or forecast efficiently.”
LGG Industrial also needed to manage volatility resulting from disruptions such as tariffs and supplier shifts, while consolidating data from six ERP instances across acquired entities. “We couldn’t get a pulse on EBITDA or product margin until after the fact,” Lauren says. “It was all reactive.”
The team sought to replace Prophix with a solution that could meet their need for real-time reporting across a complex accounting structure—that’s when they found Vena.
Real-Time Reporting and Strategic Forecasting With Vena
With Vena, Lauren and her team have transformed the way they work. Financial data now flows directly into Vena from six ERP instances (including multiple Prelude and P21 environments), allowing the team to automate board reporting and month-end variance analysis.
“Month-end reporting used to take days. Now it takes minutes,” says Lauren. “We use the reporting book feature, change a process variable, hit refresh, and we’re done.”
Vena’s Excel-native environment also facilitated easy user adoption. The team quickly built dynamic templates for month-end and regional reporting, eliminating repetitive manual formatting and enabling faster delivery of insights to leadership.
With Vena, LGG Industrial has unified its reporting, forecasting, and analytics into a single, connected platform, empowering leadership with real-time insights and laying the foundation for long-term strategic impact.
Using Vena Insights, executives now have instant access to pre-configured dashboards that track EBITDA, sales, margin, and operating spend by region and customer segment. “Our executives had never had this level of visibility,” says Lauren. “Now they can check on performance mid-month, something we’ve never been able to offer before.”
These insights are already helping the team evaluate tariff exposure, pricing strategy, and market volatility in real time. “We’re using Vena Insights to identify volatility in our duty lines and forecast the impact,” Lauren adds.
Lauren led the implementation herself, working closely with Vena consultant Leo Lam. “This was my first implementation, and it went incredibly smoothly,” she says. “Leo was phenomenal. He taught me everything I needed to become a Vena expert and train the team.”
Looking ahead, LGG plans to roll out workforce planning and revenue margin templates within Vena, which should help reduce budget input time from one week to a single day. The finance team is also partnering with ownership to establish a company-wide KPI framework, enabling faster, more informed decisions.
Vena is helping us move beyond the numbers. We’re no longer just reporting, we’re shaping strategy.”
Lauren Rader
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, LGG Industrial