Beauty product sales have had a makeover in recent years, shifting from department stores into specialty shops and accelerating in online and mobile sales channels. In the U.S. and Canada, one Anaplan customer has elegantly navigated that transformation to become the region’s leading prestige beauty retailer.
Forecasting and budgeting are foundational practices for retailers because their costs – greatly impacted by the number and location of stores, marketing activities, and the need for employees – change continuously depending on sales expectations. In this environment, this company’s SAP BPC system didn’t provide the forecasting agility that finance leaders wanted. It required users to download data from source systems, update that data in a spreadsheet, and upload it back to a central system. If someone failed to update data on time – such as a change in sales numbers or revised timing of promotional activities – the forecast could swing by millions of dollars. Further complicating the problem, each department in the company had its own profit and loss (P&L) structure, which meant critical data often ended up in an “other” category in consolidated forecasts.
“We needed a system in which all teams could work in parallel to create a single source of truth,” says the company’s Corporate Treasurer. The company chose Anaplan – an easy decision, given that its corporate parent and several sister companies already used Anaplan.
Led by the Senior Finance Manager, the company built a comprehensive financial forecasting model in Anaplan, augmented by specialized Anaplan models for headquarters payroll, IT projects, capital expenditure (capex), and analysis of central vs. store costs. For consistency and ease of reporting, the finance team built the solution using a shared P&L structure and a single Data Hub. (To learn more about the company’s multiple connected models, download the full story.)
