How Unipharm built a transparent financial planning process and S&OP in 10 countries using Anaplan’s cloud platform

Unipharm is an international pharmaceutical company specializing in the development, production and sale of high-quality pharmaceutical drugs and nutritional supplements. The company’s business is developing dynamically across ten countries.

The data for planning financial flows in different countries was kept in Excel, which resulted in issues related to reliability, validity, and processing speed. Sales and operations for each country were planned in various models, and did not ultimately provide an accurate picture of the company’s profit and loss (P&L).

To address all of these issues, a single model was needed that would be trusted by all its users. As well as that, more participants from more departments needed to be involved in the integrated business planning (IBP) process.

The flexibility of the Anaplan platform made it possible for us to work simultaneously on several processes — financial planning & analysis (FP&A) and, at the same time, sales & operations planning (S&OP).

As a result, Unipharm has overcome a number of important challenges:

• A single S&OP model was launched for all countries: the USA, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Uzbekistan, and Moldova. This made Anaplan the key planning platform, and built an ecosystem around it.
• The supply chain function was spun off into a separate team. This team, by working with features such as event calendars, supply coordination tools, and with tactical and strategic planning, now “speaks the same language”, and communicates effectively.
• As a result, the team managed to get to a single source of truth. This meant that situations where purchasing, logistics, and other departments all saw different costs were now a thing of the past.
• A system for the validation of incoming data was set up so that data becomes available to users only after it has been verified. This eliminated all cases of missing or incorrect data on individual products, and increased overall confidence in data.
• One of the key success factors was the Planingo team’s methodology, whereby all processes — from data collection to the reporting interface — were worked out on a turnkey basis.

• Crucial decisions, in a time of uncertainty and rapidly changing external factors, can now be taken significantly quicker. For example, the actual P&L is now generated in just 30 minutes, as opposed to multiple days, which has been a breakthrough (or disruption) for the existing product cut.
• The sales and production planning process freed up a significant portion of the company’s working capital by identifying inventories that seemed inaccurate.