Nobody likes a know-it-all.
(Usually.)
But if “knowing it all” means “financial omniscience”. . .
FROM HUNDREDS OF
STAND-ALONE SYSTEMS AND
PROCESSES TO A
SINGLE (OMNISCIENT?)
SOURCE OF TRUTH
The Situation
True omniscience belongs to the realm of the spiritual, or fantastical. Maybe the science-fictional. But for the largest global companies—comprising dozens upon dozens of products operating across dozens of countries—creating a unified view of the consolidated financials, performance measures, and global capabilities across the organization is the kind of omniscience that could be worth pursuing. And for one such company, the time had come to attempt to bring that vision to fruition.
The CFO at this global corporation knew that not only did the Finance function simply not have access to the unified financial view or foundational data it needed to perform planning, budgeting, and variance analysis tasks, but also its cost-to-serve model for finance was well above the industry average. The time for change had come.
The company’s legacy processes were manual and their environments lacked standardization across different groups, leading to inconsistency, with wildly varying levels of detail and accuracy that made it difficult to compare financial actuals across different areas of the business or execute planning beyond a rudimentary summary level. And from a data perspective, each of those areas had built their own bespoke systems and data models. The result? There was no simple way to construct a view of financial results with any real granularity. Which meant that questions about what was actually driving real business outcomes were hard—often impossible—to answer.
While these challenges were hardly unprecedented, the scale of the transformation called for—a comprehensive process and technology transformation—was daunting. Perhaps unprecedented. The company had tried to tackle this issue before, but success had proved elusive. A new approach was needed—and to drive that approach, the CFO turned to Deloitte.
THE SOLVE
THE TRICK TO A LONG
JOURNEY?
KEEP TO THE VISION,
KEEP TO THE PATH.
The Impact
With the joint SAP Central Finance–Anaplan implementation complete, the company has moved to a more unified planning process that covers each financial statement across the entire organization. It is now able to more-closely coordinate planning across commercial and supply chain to create a unified view of the direction of the overall business. In addition, the company can now plan to a more elongated time horizon, allowing for better and more distant planning, with less variability in the planning process and greater transparency into how plans are derived. And, of course, at the heart of all of these improvements is the company’s enhanced ability to derive better insights into the data and from there drive improved business decision-making.
Deloitte has substantially streamlined and automated the process for end users across the end-to-end planning cycle. This includes automating data reconciliation across processes; activating system-generated planning methodologies across the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow; and providing real-time reporting capabilities to facilitate management reviews. Finance planners now begin each planning cycle with a fully forecasted baseline to kick off and streamline planning activities. They are then equipped with the ability to influence assumptions and drivers based on market conditions and organizational strategies to finalize their plans. This can lead to automated reporting that facilitates the management review cadence.
The transformation has also allowed the client to meet its business case objectives by reducing the overall cost to serve in finance. We were also able to improve the quality of the forecast by implementing tighter process integration between commercial and supply chain organizations.
LET'S CONNECT.
Do these challenges sound familiar?