Forecasting models are created with focus on revenue-related activities in the current fiscal year, for long-term and short term. The forecasting models are not monolithic; because the client has multiple product offerings and a variety of sales motions at each cost center, AX team has created revenue-forecasting model in Anaplan that are fine-tuned for the overall global marketing budget allocation, driving cost-savings for the client.

Challenges:

• Multiple tools for data analysis, ETL, visualizations and calculations made the overall marketing mix process cumbersome
• The client wanted a seamless analytics solution to depict the pre-market analyses and allocate the budgets required for Go-to-market at their largest distributor’s existing and new stores.

User Painpoints:

• Lack of standards in the model and data validation.
• Millions of records - manual assignment of projects to each record is almost impossible in Excel taking into account specific PO, vendor, cost center etc. which were upto 18 fields.
• Mapping records across multiple excel files on each cost center for the planners is tedious and almost undoable manually.

Use Cases:

• Go-to-Market Finance Planning and Analysis
• Finance Forecasting

Results at a Glance:

• Staging Module Created for Data Validation
• Created 5Y and 10Y forecasting models for distributor cost centers.
• YOY forecasting delivered for short-term planning and budget allocation
• Transformed Manual Excel-based Processes with Anaplan based planning

Benefits Delivered:

• Consolidated dashboard created in Anaplan for what-if analyses, time-series analysis and sales forecasting.
• Enabled budget allocation at distributor store level for all the regions.
• Integration with PowerBI after model build and execution.

Impact Generated:

• Eliminated manual processes on Excel which had 40+ spreadsheets, taking over 4 weeks for forecast reporting, by automating the process with real-time reporting on Anaplan.
• Automation delivered on Anaplan with clicks, by replacing Excel based categorization of millions of records - which was almost impossible.