How Carlsberg Group built an Integrated Financial Planning process based on the Anaplan platform

Accelerating company’s digital business transformation has recently become pivotal due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that part of the team started working remotely. One of the largest and most important initiatives within the plan became the project of automating an integrated financial forecasting (P&L). The business team set the following requirements for a future IT platform and the project overall:

• Reduce the time and cost spent on making a financial plan
• Increase granularity of the forecast
• Improve quality and speed in decision making within the S&OP process

Thanks to an integrated planning platform Anaplan, a tailored solution was developed and launched according to Carlsberg’s specifications:

• A model to make a financial forecast was created, down to the level of SKU and customer, which was based on various input data: logistics costs, revenue, COGS, production costs, marketing and other costs.
• Implementation of Scenario planning functionality to improve flexibility and quality of business decisions.
• Anaplan became a single source of truth, mitigating the risks of misaligned assumptions, duplicating calculations, and resolving conflicting decisions.
• The implemented platform enabled the team to move away from data collection, processing, and quality checking to more human-centric tasks such as analyzing and taking proactive action.

• Saving 400 man-days per year on data consolidation and verification.
• The time for calculating P&L in the detail of SKU-Subchannel-Geography-Client has been reduced from 7 to 3 working days.
• Improved accuracy and transparency of calculations within the process.