How Holcim built an Integrated planning tool in Anaplan

Holcim is the world’s leader in manufacturing building materials and providing complex solutions for the construction industry. As a response to market challenges, the company develops and sells universal and innovative products: cement, aggregates, concrete blends for building oil and gas facilities, plants, skyscrapers, highways, low-rise buildings, and private residences.

In a bid to increase effectiveness of the current planning process and react faster in a very competitive environment, the business needed a platform for planning automation to consolidate detailed plans efficiently and support a cross- functional collaboration around planning and budgeting.

The Anaplan integrated planning platform was chosen and implemented to address the following project objectives:

• To allow key business users to become fully involved in the planning and budgeting processes.
• To create a unified forecasting environment for business users, empowering them to work with harmonized references and data.
• To have more detailed plans without hiring new employees.
• To introduce pre-set calculations and swift data transferring with the aim of switching from a mechanical way of analysis (data collection and cleansing) to an analytical one.
• To decrease manual work and hence the number of errors in planning.

• A significant time reduction for sales representatives which allows for more time to be spent on demand planning, plans consolidation, reviewing and making corrections.
• The time spent on collecting and analyzing information for panning was reduced to several hours and days depending on the department.
• Process automation and a single methodology significantly reduced errors and dependency on people.