Global food business

Our SAP consultants were asked to produce a financial planning and daily sales reporting system which would:

• replace manual planning in Excel with an IT-supported solution
• provide a flexible planning tool which could make adjustments at brand/product or customer/channel level
• include daily sales data showing performance against plan
• automate reporting and make it available over the company intranet each day.

The existing planning solution relied on 2 senior accountants churning through existing BI reports in Excel and manually adjusting the data to produce the monthly plan. This took them 4 days each month, relying on Excel workbooks with numerous hidden macros. Sales data was held in the existing BW system, but they had no quick way of tracking the sales performance against the approved plan. They now required this daily, in order to respond immediately — instead of the following month.

We spent 4 weeks with our client’s finance team in order to:

• understand their manual processes
• understand all of their sources of data (flat files, BW reports, Excel workbooks)
• map out all the processes they performed monthly.

We proposed using BW Integrated Planning (IP), since this used their current SAP systems, and we would build planning functions to retain the flexibility of their current solution. We also proposed a set of daily sales dashboards which would automatically refresh each night before being published on the intranet.

• We built a high-quality bespoke planning solution
• We cut the time it took for the finance team to do their planning from 4 days to a single afternoon
• Our solution is now supported by IT – no longer reliant on Excel and macros
• Daily sales reports now show performance against plan
• Data is now refreshed every 24 hours
• The solution was used to promote IP and dashboard reporting across the business globally.

The daily update allows the business to respond quickly to sales and promotional performance, generating £100,000s of revenue which would otherwise have been missed. The finance team also saves 7 days every month in their planning cycle.