Deloitte Germany accelerates finance and capacity planning to support growth

To enable its rapid, robust expansion, Deloitte Germany replaced manual, time-consuming financial and capacity planning processes with Anaplan, cutting routine process times by 50% and enabling the company to continue its growth in an environment of a constantly increasing staffing and project volume.

Deloitte is a leading professional services firm worldwide, with a broad portfolio that unites Advisory with Assurance and Compliance services. “We serve many organizations across a diverse range of sectors and every company that we work with is transforming with high intensity,” explains Thorsten Seiler, Head of Controlling at Deloitte Germany. “To deliver excellent professional services, it’s vital that we can keep our finger on the pulse of emerging business trends and market conditions.”

With economic volatility challenging organizations in every sector, more companies are turning to Deloitte for support and guidance. “We’re helping our clients navigate a huge number of complex projects in uncertain times,” comments Christopher Nuerk, Portfolio Leader, Enterprise Performance at Deloitte Germany. “To do this successfully and enable our own business growth, it’s important that our financial planning activities be timely, thorough, and accurate.”

In the past, a dedicated team created detailed capacity and financial plans using a combination of spreadsheets and home-grown planning tools. With this approach, combining data from across the organization and building plans could take up to two months. For Nuerk, Seiler, and their colleagues, this was too slow given new project developments and market changes.

Building true integrated planning processes

The Anaplan platform was utilized by the Deloitte Germany team in order to transform and accelerate their planning processes. Building on robust revenue forecasting in Anaplan, the firm has expanded into annual financial planning (including profit and loss) and capacity forecasting, with further use cases lined up for the future.

“With Anaplan we were able to build truly integrated planning processes and gain real-time access to our data,” Seiler says. “The impact of any changes that we make to our cost position or revenue is immediately reflected in other line items within Anaplan, helping us to react very quickly to new developments.”

The Deloitte Germany team aimed to get up and running with Anaplan as quickly as possible, leveraging Deloitte's own highly experienced Anaplan practice that has delivered the platform to many clients. “I’m really proud of the strong working relationship we established with Anaplan,” Nuerk says. “The support was fabulous, and we were able to solve issues quickly. In under three months, we were able to build the Anaplan platform.”

Accelerated processes deliver efficiency and user satisfaction

With Anaplan, Deloitte Germany has accelerated and simplified its forecasting and planning activities. “My favorite thing about Anaplan is the ease of use, the mobile capabilities, and having the plan data aligned and consolidated during the entire cycle,” says Nuerk. “Before using Anaplan, our planning processes and the alignment took a couple of months. Now we do this in two or three weeks, if necessary, and we even had a planning conclave where we did this in one-and-a-half days.”

Anaplan users at Deloitte Germany are pleased with the platform. “We’ve had very positive feedback from end users and the uptake of Anaplan has been very high,” says Seiler. “One of the many benefits of Anaplan is that users can get to grips with the basic principles really quickly and then apply to the solution to a range of scenarios without any additional training.”

Besides the successful deployment at its German business, Deloitte is employing and rolling out Anaplan in many other regions around the globe. “We’ve already started the next step in our Anaplan journey by bringing more locations onto the platform, integrating additional applications into our workflows and exploring use cases beyond planning and forecasting,” Nuerk says. “Anaplan is an integral part of Deloitte’s expansion strategy, and helps us as we empower our global customers, too.”