Streamlining Budgeting & Forecasting for a Large Retailer.
Customer Overview
- Large retailer with value-driven product range
- 1,800+ stores across 10 geo-political locations
- Operations spread over Indian subcontinent, Africa and Middle East
- Diversified portfolio or renowned, as well as home-grown brands
Key Challenges
- Time-consuming, person dependent spreadsheet-based process
- 5 months to complete 1 cycle of financial & management reporting
- Lack of visibility, accountability & collaboration
- Poor version control resulting from back & forth between stores & regional heads
- Laborious store-level planning of events & promotional activities
- Lack of data uniformity due to geographical and operational diversity
- Untimely & inaccurate consolidation of budget due to geographical and currency variations
- Unstructured sharing of budget files between territories and stores
- Inability to conduct top-down & bottom-up budgeting
Key Requirements
- Streamlining planning activities on a collaborative platform
- Conducting top-down & bottom-up planning
- Enabling version control across multiple-iterations
- Accommodating store-level promotional activity planning
- Linking operational activities with financial goals
Key Benefits
- 100% transparency of data
- Forecasting basis historical data accelerated TTV
- Reduction in cycle time from 15 days to few hours
- Dynamic, real-time currency conversion with rate flexibility
- Digital automation of manual tasks & activities
- Data uniformity using a secured, governed & compliant platform
- Fast & real-time consolidation for data across 1,800 stores
- Multi-dimensional budgeting against currencies, geographies etc.
Solution Delivered
IBM Planning Analytics was the platform of choice for introducing efficiency & resilience in planning, budgeting, forecasting activities.
It is an integrated planning solution that uses AI to automate planning, budgeting, and forecasting and drive more intelligent workflows.
Built on TM1, IBM’s powerful calculation engine, this enterprise performance management tool allows you to transcend the limits of manual planning and quickly drive faster, more accurate plans.
The gold-standard platform coupled with a deep understanding of customer pain areas enabled blueprinting of a holistic solution — one that not only helped in process optimisation, but also operational efficiency.
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