At a Glance

• A live NetSuite integration replaced a full day of manual actuals entry with a scheduled daily refresh that can be pushed on demand.

• Automated business-unit reporting across five business units reclaimed the three to four hours spent each month rebuilding P&Ls by hand.

• Budgets and forecasts now live side by side as scenarios, saving four to eight hours of monthly variance analysis.

• A single model holds the rolling forecast, long-range plans, and capacity-expansion scenarios — no more parallel spreadsheets to reconcile.

The Challenge: Planning That Couldn’t Keep Up

Every model, data center, and AI-enabled device runs on silicon. Semiconductors are the nuts and bolts of the AI era — the physical layer beneath the software — and the wafers they are built on come from a small set of precision manufacturers operating in one of the most capital-intensive, cyclical industries in the world. It is an environment that rewards foresight and punishes guesswork.

Pure Wafer competes in exactly that environment. The largest broker of prime wafers in North America and one of the country’s leading wafer reclaimers, it runs a genuinely multi-faceted business — wafer fabrication and reclaim, foundry services, thin films, precision cleaning, and brokerage — across three operating locations and five business units, helping the world’s top semiconductor OEMs mitigate supply-chain risk. That breadth is a strength in the market and a challenge to plan: many interlocking product lines, a complex supply chain, and manufacturing operations that each move to their own rhythm. Yet all of it was planned out of a large, multi-sheet Excel file with a great many moving parts. The strain became acute during a company sale, when the finance team maintained three separate long-range models over the course of nearly a year and a half.

“We were maintaining three long-range models over almost a year and a half. Every time we refreshed, we had to update actuals across all three Excel files, then make global assumption changes plus individual updates for each scenario. It was hard to maintain and subject to error.” — Scott Murcray, Chief Financial Officer, Pure Wafer

Each refresh meant re-entering actuals by hand across every file, then layering in assumption changes — some global, some specific to a single scenario. It was slow, fragile, and difficult to trust. And with another transaction likely within three to five years, Murcray knew the cycle would repeat; he was intent on finding a system where he could maintain actuals and manage different models with ease.

Why Pigment

The search began with a trusted recommendation. Scott Murcray reached out to a consultant he had worked with previously, who told him the industry leaders were all using Pigment. A demo followed, and Murcray was sold. The same consultant introduced Pure Wafer to Amvent, a specialist Pigment implementation partner, to lead the build.

What sold him was not planning alone but range. Murcray chose Pigment not only for its planning functionality but for its potential across other parts of the business — a complete solution, in his words, that could touch needs well outside of FP&A. The clearest measure of success was equally practical: reproduce the business as it actually runs, then make it easy to plan against. The most important thing, he said, was to replicate the business model while managing different scenarios, from long-range plans to what-if analysis — and Pigment addressed all of it.

Why Amvent

The same referral that led Pure Wafer to Pigment also introduced the team to Amvent, a specialist Pigment implementation partner. For a business with as many interlocking parts as Pure Wafer — multiple product lines, a complex supply chain, and five business units — the implementation was less about software setup than about faithfully reproducing how the business actually runs. Amvent led the full build: a NetSuite-fed data hub, workforce and expense planning, topline planning, and reporting, delivered as a working model that Murcray and his controller could own themselves.

“Amvent understood our business, not just the tool. They translated a genuinely complicated operation into a model that reflects how we actually run — and left us able to manage it ourselves. It was exactly the kind of partnership we needed.” — Scott Murcray, Chief Financial Officer, Pure Wafer

The Use Case: From Manual Upkeep to Real Analysis

Working with Amvent, Pure Wafer stood up a Pigment model spanning a NetSuite-fed data hub, workforce and expense planning, topline planning, and reporting. Three areas of daily work changed most.

Updating actuals.

Once the single biggest obstacle to refreshing a forecast, the task is now handled by a native NetSuite connection.

“Being able to integrate seamlessly with NetSuite is a huge time saver. Updating actuals in Excel was clunky and time-consuming — maybe up to a day. It was the biggest inhibitor to updating forecasts. Now it’s scheduled daily and can be pushed anytime.” — Scott Murcray, Chief Financial Officer, Pure Wafer

Business-unit reporting.

Reporting separately on five business units — revenue, gross margin, and more — once meant three to four hours of manual P&L building each month. Pigment now produces those cuts automatically, which, as Murcray notes, lets the team focus on trends and variances rather than assembly.

Variance analysis.

Previously budgets lived in NetSuite while forecasts lived only in Excel, leaving nowhere to compare them cleanly. Holding both as scenarios in Pigment saves an estimated four to eight hours every month. Taken together, the manual upkeep of the model has largely disappeared, freeing the team to update monthly, or as needed, with little effort.

What’s Next

For now, Murcray and his controller are the primary users, and monthly review has become markedly simpler for both.

“My controller and I are the primary users. It makes monthly review very easy for both of us.” — Scott Murcray, Chief Financial Officer, Pure Wafer

The near-term ambition is to widen participation — extending data input to more teams across sales and operations so planning reflects the business closer to where the numbers originate. Longer term, Pure Wafer sees room to carry Pigment into areas beyond finance, in keeping with the reason it chose the platform in the first place: a foundation broad enough to grow on. In a capital-intensive, cyclical industry that underpins the broader AI buildout, that foundation matters — ready for the next planning cycle, and the next transaction, before either arrives.