How SetPoint Medical Streamlined Budgeting and Forecasting with Solver

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I'm the Vice President of Operations. And, uh, in the startup world, I mean, uh, at Setpoint there's about 50 of us. Uh, half of the company is comprised of our clinical operations group, and the other half is really our engineering arm,

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and that's split up between product development, quality, and manufacturing. And so I primarily come in and I support, uh, the manufacturing group, as well as all the back office activity. We went through this budgeting activity, and this budgeting activity between the different departments and, uh,

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different leaders in each department took weeks and months to complete between Excel spreadsheets and reconciling those spreadsheets, and edits and updates. And we, we needed to find a better way to do that. It has taken that, uh,

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process that took months down to hours and days, and has provided a flexible solution for us to really, like, uh, be more in control of what our expenses are, our forecasting, our budgeting, so that we have a better understanding of not what's… not only what's happening today, but we can look out, uh,

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for months and years and have an amount of confidence there that we didn't have before. Nobody likes the budgeting process, and it's cumbersome and has been difficult. Um, but I am like a… I, I am a Solver groupie because we're actually going through it now.

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Every quarter we sit down and, uh, in the matter of a few hours are able to refresh our forecast and really make sure that we're tracking, like I said, we're tracking those expenses to activities, to our budgeted dollars, and ensuring that, uh,

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we're capturing everything that we need to capture. We can get, uh, the same or better information in ways that lets our department managers, our, uh, subject matter experts focus on the main drive of serving our patients and serving the,

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uh, medical community in ways that they wouldn't otherwise be able to. Now, when we learned about what was, uh, uh, happening in March of last year, we were alarmed. And in fact, we acted, uh, pretty rapidly to make operational changes to support working remotely.

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I think we… Because we talked to Solver, uh, you know, we use it, the web app, um, has supported or kind of helped us, uh, work through that in the sense that it's not… We're decentralized.

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And so, uh, as we work through the budgeting process, as we work through how we update and maintain controls of our expenses, we're able to do that in a, uh, decoupled way from a building. We looked at companies in a similar position to ours,

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medical device startup companies that had a revolutionary or novel technology that had a long development cycle and were in the same, or same or similar position at that point, five or six years in, working with the FDA, uh, with a s you know, a fair-sized team, uh, 30 to 40 employees.

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And we benchmarked what those companies were doing to control inventory and control finance and, you know, what are they doing on their ERPs and MRPs. And what we found was most companies like ours were using the kind of classic ase Excel spreadsheets,

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a very manual process, error-prone. In fact, we were doing that in the very beginning. But as we've transitioned, invested in developing the kind of our Solver platform, I can… I know, because of, because of that m benchmarking effort,

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that we are really at the kind of front end of finance control, uh, accounting control, those dashboarding activities. When I look at Solver, my, my dream has always been to get to that one button, uh, type dashboard,

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where you open it up and you can see the performance of your company. I think that Solver can help us get there, even at a company that's, you know, 50 employees and, um, and, uh, with a, a, a modest, uh, back office to support it.