A leader in Australia in the retail and distribution of performance and lifestyle footwear with over 420 stores across 10 different retail banners.
At a glance
Challenges
Working solely using Excel
Produce a consolidated budgeting report was difficult
Lengthy budget process
Benefits
98% time saved in the budgeting process
80% of the budgeting completed within a month
Advantages
First advantage
All month-end reports are generated more accurately with a simple click of a button.
Second advantage
Uploading wholesale data to the database takes only a minute now.
Third advantage
Freed time to do analysis and focus on fine-tuning other financial aspects.
Objective
The Australian retailer was always used to produce budgets using Excel as long as they were limited to 20 stores. However, with a massive jump to over 420 stores in the past 3 years, it became increasingly impossible to work solely using Excel. Secondly, given the fact that different ERPs were being run across their organization it was getting increasingly challenging to produce a consolidated view as their wholesale data had to be extracted separately and stored in separate Excel cubes; which in itself would take up to 1 hour for the macros to be run.
Solution
The above challenges were successfully overcome with the following benefits being realized:
A common data foundation was formed for planning, budgeting, and forecasting across the organization with all relevant data flowing in a unified manner, which made performing ad hoc reporting much easier.
GL (General Ledger) consolidations and management reports could be prepared with complete automation with data consistency being maintained constantly.
Simplified and improved data preparation and increased the frequency, accuracy, and granularity of forecasts by using both financial and non-financial information as well as simulation and scenario considerations.
All month-end reports could now be generated more accurately with a simple click of a button.
