Old World Confectioner 
Discovers Modern Assets Management

WorthIT Fixed Assets streamlines systems and
frees up financial staff for higher-level work

Ferrero USA, Inc., is the stateside manufacturer and distributor for Ferrero Group.  Founded in the 1920's as a small patisserie in Turin, Italy, Ferrero grew into an international confectionery manufacturer by the end of the 1940s.  Today, Ferrero is one of the world's biggest confectioners and produces a number of famous candies, among them Mon Cheri and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, Nutella spread, Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs and Tic Tac mints.

Ferrero had no fixed asset management system in place other than a spreadsheet listing the thousands of items owner by the company. Felix America, Ferrero's industrial division controller, says keeping track of the depreciation of these assets was a headache.  "We had to update our fixed asset record from the ledger and then do a manual calculation of each asset category depending on different depreciation rates," he says. Furthermore, those assets could not be viewed by item, only by dollar total under a general heading. The lack of an automated fixed asset system cost Ferrero many hours of work and did not provide enough detail necessary to efficiently run the business. And, the amount of time required to manually transfer numbers from ledger to ledger and essentially reinvent the document each time it was requested took accounting personnel away from the more important task of running day-to-day operations.

So in early 1995, the company began the search for a solution.  Although the company reviewed solutions from several vendors, only one offered the functionality Ferrero required at an acceptable cost.  Ferrero's choice was WorthIT Software's WorthIT Fixed Assets.  WorthIT Fixed Assets, currently in its fourth release, is used by more than 3000 users in major corporations to standardize the management of their fixed assets across local, national and international affiliates.

WorthIT Fixed Assets helped Ferrero gain control over its asset management and depreciation accounting with a full set of tools including Fixed Assets Management, Depreciation Accounting and Capital Budgeting. 

Depreciation Accounting is the foundation of WorthIT. Ferrero can design custom depreciation schedules, prorate costs, effect group transfers and disposals, track unlimited partial disposals, simulate disposal scenarios and compile comprehensive financial reports, G/L posting vouchers and more. 

WorthIT also includes extensive budgeting capabilities that let Ferrero monitor actual expenditures against multiple budgets or forecasts, simulate projected depreciation charges and track major projects effectively.

Additionally, WorthIT gives Ferrero the ability to track asset locations, maintain service history, allocate costs by project, monitor assets under construction, or catalogue asset specifications with built-in Location, Service, Task and Folder components.  "We can see, in a given asset number, a lot of information, "says America.  "For example, when we acquire an asset we can see the depreciation rate to be used, where the asset is located, which department it's in and what's the history of depreciation so far.  We can also see the composition of the cost of the asset, what items it includes.  We didn't have that capability before."

America adds that asset depreciation takes less than half the time it used to, freeing financial personnel to do more important work than simply shuffle numbers around for reports.  Add to that level of asset-description detail it provides, and WorthIT becomes one of Ferrero USA's most valued assets.