INDUSTRIAL COMPANY – Sales budget:

sales planning and forecasting project

PROBLEMS

  • Lack of a budget culture: being a multinational company and lacking a shared and centralised system for “making” budgets, data was delivered to controllers in different forms and ways with a consequent huge loss of time for them to standardise and use the information

  • Lack of reliability of information: without a tool to guide and control planners in the drafting of their sales budgets, the information that reached the controllers was more often than not incorrect or missing

  • Lack of ‘hard’ data: at the end of the budget process, data was most often modified or corrected, losing its usefulness

  • Slow usability of information: available data was fragmented and stored in different forms, as a result, waiting times were unacceptable for top managers to respond to requests for information

  • Lack of usefulness of data entry: lack of a process and system to assist planners in entering sales data, methods by which this was constructed were poorly ‘thought out’ and mostly entered hastily to meet delivery deadlines rather than reasoned on the basis of actual data or necessary indicators

  • Impossibility or excessive slowness in using data converted into a single currency

  • Lack of single, shared reporting system: top managers often found themselves arguing on the basis of different and incorrect data

REQUESTS

  • A centralised system for collecting budget data aimed at:

    • Increasing the availability of information
    • Creating a single and shared corporate culture in a multinational reality
    • Certifying the certainty of the goodness of the data entered
    • Certifying the certainty of the ownership of the data entered by individual sales managers
    • Preventing the amendment of data when the process is closed
    • Increasing control of the budget process by supervisors
    • Providing comparability of data with the history rather than actual or forecast data
    • Creating unique and easily available company reporting from anywhere in the world

  • A budget process that can handle:

    • The automated loading of data from feeding systems
    • The scheduling of calculation rules for actual data or data required for budget construction
    • Multi-currency entries and subsequent display of aggregated data in US dollars or Euro
    • The immediate reproportioning of annual data over months
    • Automatic data entry based on dynamic rules dictated by the needs of individual sales managers
    • Intra-group and intercompany relations

SOLUTIONS

  • A system capable of:

    • Automating the feeding processes and scheduling the calculation rules necessary for the budgeting process
    • Providing reliable information in a very short time
    • Having a single budgeting tool shared and usable from anywhere in the world
    • Guaranteeing the ownership of input data through the implementation of a provisioning system
    • Guaranteeing the non-modifiability of the budget data when the process is closed
    • Providing, through a structured workflow, supervisors with a tool to control the progress of work and ownership at that specific time
    • Providing to planners, through the use of pre-built task lists, a guide for budget data entry also through the dynamic use and execution of ad hoc rules for each individual sales manager
    • Providing individual users involved in the budget process with all useful and necessary information for the construction of data such as historical data, forecasts and specific indicators
    • Managing multi-currency input and its conversion into US dollars/euros
    • Providing fast and flexible tools for reproportioning data on the lower levels of the various hierarchies
    • Intra-group and intercompany relations
    • Interfacing with Office tools to ensure greater flexibility and less deviation from the previous habits of the users involved
    • Providing a single, shared corporate report that can be used by both top management and individual sales managers

INDUSTRIAL COMPANY – Analysis of variable sales costs:

planning and control of a variable sales cost budget

PROBLEMS

  • Absence of production cost data for most business divisions in the world

  • Difficulty in constructing cost rate calculations due to the many factors that are involved in the calculation process and the lack of a suitable tool for determining them

  • Lack of a profit and loss account including cost data and therefore the impossibility of carrying out a complete analysis of the production and sales process

  • Lack of management of infra-group and intercompany relations

  • Lack of a cost budget culture

  • Lack of control reporting on cost data

REQUESTS

  • Design and implement a cost budget process on the basis of the Italy model to:

    • Provide all company divisions worldwide with a single reference model
    • De-centralise cost data entry by bringing it closer to the production centres
    • Process rate data by cost centre according to certain rules established by the top management and with immediate reaction times
    • Allocate cost data generated by indirect cost centres to direct cost centres by using dynamic and flexible drivers
    • Allocate cost data generated by utilities to direct cost centres through the use of dynamic and flexible drivers
    • Manage intra-group and intercompany relationships
    • Manage the multi-currency input and related conversion of aggregated data into US dollars or Euro

  • Provide cost data for individual cost centres in order to assess their efficiency

  • Provide top management with a single, shared report that is easily accessible from all over the world

  • Draw up a profit and loss account at the end of the process that combines sales and cost data for the individual company divisions and for the entire group

SOLUTIONS

  • A system capable of:

    • Automating the feeding processes and scheduling the calculation rules necessary for the budgeting process
    • Providing reliable information in a very short time
    • Relieve the top management from the task of gathering the information necessary for their role
    • Having a single budgeting tool shared and usable from all over the world
    • Guaranteeing the ownership of input data through the implementation of a provisioning system
    • Guaranteeing the non-modifiability of the budget data when the process is closed
    • Providing planners with all necessary indicators for the construction of rate data
    • Providing, through the use of pre-built task lists, planners with a guide and a sequence for entering data, per individual cost centre, for the determination of rates such as: human hours, electricity, methane, external maintenance, internal maintenance, production services, consumables, raw materials, services, etc.
    • Providing the possibility to choose the driver for each indirect cost centre to be used for the reallocation of direct cost to centres
    • Providing quick reallocation rules that can be executed manually or by scheduling
    • Generating total cost by relating the rates generated with sales quantities and machine/human hours
    • Intra-group and intercompany relations
    • Managing currency conversion
    • Providing controllers with all the reports they need to control data either through shared reports or through the use of ad hoc reports integrated with Office
    • Grouping sales and cost data and generating a complete P&L account available to all users involved

Large-scale distribution COMPANY – Sales analysis and budget:

Creating a reporting system in order to monitor sales figures and compare them with budget figures

PROBLEMS

  • Lack of a sales data collection system easily consulted by the top management

  • Lack of an estimation system for any data not received from the cash barrier of individual points of sale

  • Excessively long sales data collection times

  • Presence of inconsistent data between the various company areas

  • Excessively laborious and lengthy processing times for sensitive indicators, such as parity and progressives

  • Difficulties in including non-direct sales outlets in the analysis of the various ASAs

  • Difficulties in managing format changes of individual points of sale

  • Impossibility of assessing the goodness of the business strategies adopted

  • Difficulties in analysing deviations between actual and historical data

  • Lack of a single, shared budget process

REQUESTS

  • Create a system capable of collecting all sales information from both direct and indirect points of sale so as to provide it to the top management on a daily basis through the automatic sending of sms/mails and the automatic filing of reports in shared areas

  • Create statistical estimation rules based on time series in order to determine the collection data not received by the feeding system as a result of any problem occurring at the till counter

  • Management of points of sale closed on that particular day rather than on that specific holiday

  • Create a model that can flexibly and easily manage the changeover of points of sale

  • Create a flexible and easily manageable model to determine parity

  • Historical parity for each year and creation of a system that provides the possibility of displaying sales data from previous years according to the parity of the chosen year

  • Create variance indices with historical data

  • Automatic e-mailing of reports to individual points of sale

  • Management of inputs, shortages, hours worked, net sales, etc.

SOLUTIONS

  • A system capable of:

    • Automating the daily loading of receipts
    • Scheduling the calculation rules constructed in order to: estimate unreceived receipts by means of statistical algorithms based on the available historical series, calculate the progressive data on that given day and determine the parity of the various years
    • Easily manage the choice of sales outlets closed on that specific day
    • Flexibly and easily manage any change of format of a point of sale
    • Compare sales data against previous years with the possibility also to choose the parity to be used to define the shopping basket of shops to be included in the indicators
    • Send the total company and parity collection data via sms and e-mail with relative deviations from the previous week and year (-1) to the top management
    • Generate and automatically archive reports on collection data in the shared company area
    • Automate uploads of entries, shortages, hours worked, net sales, etc. or calculate the result where necessary using flexible, scheduled rules.
    • Process a top/down budget with the reallocation of data across the entire hierarchy on the basis of flexible drivers. The data automatically reversed by the system could be in turn rectified by planners down to the lowest level of the hierarchy. A complex system of rules maintained the previously entered total data by re-proportioning any difference generated by the lower-level inputs. A workflow completed the budget process by providing supervisors with the ability to check the work progress and the process owner at that specific time.