How an online hypermarket improved the speed and quality of their financial planning with Anaplan

In any e-commerce business, the quality of the technology determines the competitiveness of the company. Technology promptly informs specialists and management of any changes, providing the necessary data to make informed management decisions. The speed of decision-making and accuracy of planning directly affect financial results, and only technology can minimize the time taken to deliver information from source to stakeholder. Earlier, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Company was faced with dramatic changes in consumer demand, which required quick decisions and business restructuring.

In this situation, there was a need for tools to calculate multiple development scenarios as quickly as possible. That’s why one of the most important initiatives for the management team was a project to automate collection of the Company’s financial plan.

The financial planning and budgeting process was implemented on the Anaplan cloud-based integrated planning platform in eight months, with the first MVP already available in five months:

• A single financial data repository was set up
• Modules to collect management reporting and make adjustments affecting all three forms of reporting were configured
• A planning model was launched for the annual budget and intra-annual plan, combining the setting of the Company’s upper-level goals with the collection of functional budgets from the bottom up
• A driver model was created for revenue and order quantity planning
• A planning model was created for transportation and warehousing operating costs
• Modules were configured for the collection of commercial, administrative and other expenses, as well as for investments with the automatic calculation of depreciation and the allocation of amounts to the required reporting forms
• A headcount planning model (both operational and administrative) was created, as well as compensation and benefits calculations
• Functional budgets for the Company were developed in accordance with the business model of each division
• Calculation of factor analysis by key target indicators was implemented
• The reporting package was automated for both the financial plan defense process and the month-end closing process

• A single integrated process was built for annual and intra-annual financial planning
• The number of manual operations and iterations for ‘gluing’ budgets was reduced
• The model significantly increases the transparency of data for the board of directors by developing the annual budget and tracking its implementation throughout the year
• Time spent on development of the financial plan was reduced: as early as 2021, results showed that the deadlines for budget collection were met
• The process became unified and transparent for all participants, a ‘hidden benefit’ became apparent: previously separate processes were combined to take into account the impact of each event
• The potential for errors was minimized
• Each budget holder now not only participates in development of the plan, but also sees how its changes affect the overall performance of the Company