Anaplan helped Unilever Finance team to save 30% on financial planning

Unilever USA is the biggest market for Unilever with a broad portfolio of brands across dozens of product categories and businesses such as beauty and personal care, home care, tea and many more. Managing such a complex and diverse portfolio posed a challenge during the pandemic as teams needed a flexible planning tool to enable the fastest reaction to constantly changing market signals.
The finance team, partnering with the Unilever S&OP team, was looking for a solution to streamline and accelerate their so-called Cash-up process which reconciles the volume from the Anaplan Demand Planning Module into Oracle PBCS in order to accurately reflect the financial numbers within the P&L. The difficulty was that the process was largely manual and hard to maintain and utilize which precluded the team from doing more value-adding activities like analysis and scenario planning.

The Anaplan Connected Planning Platform was chosen to automate the cash-up process which was built on a heavy Python script and multiple Excels. The project was delivered by a blended team consisting of the Anaplan experts and business experts from Unilever which was instrumental in launching an MVP (minimum viable product) in a record time of only two months.
The main functional specifics of the tool are as follows:

• The tool replaced the script-dependent calculation logic making it simple for any business user to maintain a newly automated process.
• Anaplan contains 3 crucial product hierarchies at a time and 6 data sources including the plan in volumes, trade rates, price lists, etc.
• It allows users to audit each cell of the calculation and trace down each assumption changed within the process.
• End users can adjust the loaded data manually and add additional assumptions to the calculations whether it be adding volume, changing the volumes to get GSV (gross sales value) rates to a smaller variance or to analyze Promo Families to SKU level to ensure all has been accounted for.
• The functionality supports analytics and decision-making for trade terms management and the yearly plan execution.

• The process speed was increased, reducing time between 30% to 40%.
• A total of 3-5 hours are saved within each S&OP cycle (monthly) for each Division.
• A number of errors and discrepancies in calculations decreased by 10% to 20%.
• Increased transparency of calculation and ability to make scenarios in real time.