Equativ finds the ideal planning tool to support growth

Equativ, an international digital advertising technology platform, is expanding rapidly in a fast-moving, sophisticated industry where operating expenses (OpEx) and staff growth management are vital to the company’s success. Manual approaches to budgeting, forecasting, and workforce planning were bottlenecks to growth and cost-tracking, but moving those processes to Anaplan — and integrating HR, CRM, and data warehouse solutions — has boosted efficiency and established a foundation to support future expansion.

Equativ connects brands and agencies looking to share their advertising campaigns with targeted audiences while supporting media publishers to generate revenue through the monetization of their inventory. Its business principles of openness, accountability, and fairness have enabled Equativ to triple in size in just four years, and the company is still expanding.

“We have an ambitious growth plan for the years ahead,” explains Amélie Boutes, FP&A Manager at Equativ. “We aim to boost our revenues, enhance our profitability, and bring more talent into the company.”

A manual approach to financial planning and analysis (FP&A) couldn’t keep pace with Equativ’s expansion. “We did most of our work with a complex set of spreadsheets managed by people across the company,” Boutes says. “Our budgeting process alone involved close to 50 different spreadsheets. Finance spent a lot of time manually consolidating data to create budgets, forecasts, and other key plans.” This manual work increased the risk of errors, created productivity bottlenecks, and made it challenging to carefully manage operating expenses (OpEx).

Changing the channel on manual planning

Equativ selected Anaplan to address these challenges, starting with FP&A. “Anaplan met all of our FP&A needs and is very user friendly,” Boutes says. “The digital advertising industry moves incredibly quickly, so we need to constantly adapt our plans while staying on top of our costs.”

Impressed by the FP&A improvements, Equativ connected hiring and workforce planning directly to finance processes using Anaplan. “Our organization depends on people. Hiring and staff mobilization are key to our success, so we’ve brought these into Anaplan,” says Boutes. “When managers request additional positions, their requests go directly to our CFO and head of HR for review in Anaplan. Once approved, the key information is automatically sent to our recruiting solution.”

Enabling seamless growth

With budgeting, forecasting, and workforce planning in Anaplan, Equativ has increased finance team productivity; improved revenue, costs, and headcount planning; and can better support rapid expansion.

Annual budgeting has been completely transformed. “No longer do we need to manually collect data from 50 different spreadsheets to plan annual budgets,” says Boutes. “With Anaplan, we have one platform that automatically consolidates key information as soon as users input the data. This has given us more time to refine our forecasts and build business partnering.”

Managing staff growth at Equativ is much simpler thanks to Anaplan integration. “With external data sources integrated with Anaplan through API [application programming interface] connections powered by Workato, we have fresh and reliable data at all times,” Boutes says. “Those data sources include Salesforce, BambooHR, and Snowflake. Integrating them has delivered significant operational efficiency gains and improved collaboration.”

Even though Equativ already uses Anaplan extensively, its Anaplan journey has only just begun. “I am really proud to have solved major pain points and bottlenecks for our administrative, operational, and management teams,” Boutes says. “Now my vision is for Anaplan to become the one-stop shop platform to support management and business decisions to drive growth at Equativ.”