In the land of Excel spreadsheets, the axiom of "too many cooks spoil the broth" certainly applies. That adage certainly was the case at Kimball Hill Homes (KHH), the $1 billion privately held builder based in Rolling Meadows, Ill. It was not uncommon for the builder's corporate planning and land acquisition processes to involve the complicated aggregation of a dozen or more Excel spreadsheets from its various divisions into a single document.

"It was really a painful process," says Frank Scaramuzza, CIO at KHH. "Our business-planning process was getting to the point where it involved a lot more people, because of our growth. There was a lot of back and forth with Excel spreadsheets. From a technology standpoint, it was a bit of a nightmare on the network."

The resolution came last year when the company incorporated a new software solution from Cognos Planning into its budgeting and forecasting processes within its financing and land acquisition departments. Kimball Hill Homes, which built more than 4,000 homes in 2005 in 14 major markets, wanted more timely financial planning to replace its spreadsheet-based system.

Scaramuzza describes the gut-wrenching spreadsheet process the corporate controller faced every year like this: "At the divisional level, we might have somebody in Sacramento working on a spreadsheet that originated from the headquarters in Chicago. That person will copy it onto their network, change it, and then send it back. We have that coming from a dozen different divisions, then we have to aggregate it into one final spreadsheet. Then, somebody might make a change, and our financial planning people would have to take all 12 and re-aggregate them."

Scaramuzza says the new system "gives us control over versions and changes and puts it all through a centralized model where everybody is updating the same thing -- so you don't have the possibility of somebody copying a spreadsheet, making changes, or even changing formatting, that makes it complicated to aggregate."

Anabel Lopez, director of finance at Kimball Hill Homes, echoes those thoughts. "We wanted more accurate and meaningful financial information in a more timely fashion with a documented audit trail capability." The Cognos Planning software can incorporate Kimball Hill Homes' Microsoft Excel spreadsheet-based system. According to Lopez, it provides the company with a "single, consistent view of planning, budgeting and forecasting."

How much time and money has the new Cognos system saved at Kimball Hill Homes? Unknown, but both Lopez and Scaramuzza have solid expectations.

More than 40 people at Kimball Hill Homes were initially licensed with access to the software. Lopez says the investment in the software will provide "a solid return on investment in terms of time savings, reduction of workload and more consistent reporting."

Scaramuzza adds, "We were pretty easily able to justify the cost of implementation by looking at the amounts of time we are expecting to save. A big part of the justification for this project is based on saving man-hours in planning."

Tony Levy, director of product at Cognos, says Kimball Hill Homes is the first homebuilder Cognos has worked with. Cognos itself is a $1 billion company with more than 2,000 customers worldwide. Its services are best suited for companies with $250 million or more in revenue.

"We have had customers reduce their financial planning process time by 50 percent with this product," Levy says. He adds that Kimball Hill Homes will be able to take advantage of the "rolling forecasting" function of the software to conduct advance planning several fiscal quarters in advance.

Scaramuzza says the land acquisition division especially plans to take advantage of the software. By plugging in as many parameters as possible into the software about a particular development, the company will be able to make better decisions about its land purchases, saving the company money in the long run.

"We are able to go back and measure against the assumptions [we made about the profitability of the project at the outset]," Scaramuzza says. "Is the actual performance of the project in line with the assumptions? If not, where are the variances and why? So next time we can make a little more intelligent decision and continue to refine our history."