Success story

A centralized platform for demand, scenario, gross margin, and sales & operations planning

By Timothy Kirby

Background

Our client is a globally recognized pharmaceutical company that provides solutions to meet patient medical needs around the world. As a research-based company in an increasingly fast-paced industry, our client needs precise calculation and connection to unify all aspects of the business. 

Typically, planning for demand across multiple real-world scenarios is a time consuming, labor intensive process that can leave less time for meaningful data investigation. Our client sought not only to substantially shorten the time needed for this extensive financial planning, but to also unlock a new level of understanding on the implications to downstream processes within the organization. 

Challenge

Prior to our implementation of Anaplan, establishing a financial plan for an organization valued at over 8 billion USD across 20 countries required over 200 different Excel documents, each with different versions of data, users, and process application. While the business methodology and Excel logic in place was sound, financial forecasts frequently erred by substantial amounts purely due to the disconnectedness in the planning process. 

At a global level, the need to forecast financial data, integrate demand and gross margin planning. and then connect this data to downstream processes such as Gross-to-Net planning quickly became a messy, time consuming process that required hours of manual work. Our client also struggled to connect their financial data to key functional areas such as sales and operations planning.

Solution

Anaplan is a cloud-based planning tool that offered exactly what our client needed – a connected planning solution that cleaned out the messy middle. Its ability to integrate with both upstream and downstream systems while also enabling real-time calculation through its patented hyper block technology is at the core of connecting people, systems, and data to generate useful insights for its users. 

Keyrus leveraged the power of this tool to consolidate data across the organization, which established a centralized platform for both demand and gross margin planning as well as sales and operation planning. This allowed for more easily digestible data and made it readily available to all parties within the organization, from executives down to business analysts. This centralized platform also meant capable and applicable connection across processes, connecting key areas of the business such as demand planning with account reconciliation. 

With the most accurate and up to date data, our client utilized a statistical methodology-based approach to calculate revenue forecasts automatically and allow for adjustments as needed. Additionally, our client can now model revenue forecasts around simulated market events and scenarios to leverage multiple “what-if” financial analyses. 

On the sales & operations side, we established a method to automatically generate customized reports including but not limited to supply plan metrics, supply versus actual and forecasted demand, and inventory analysis. 

Results

After partnering with Keyrus and leveraging the power of Anaplan, our client has a unified platform for demand and gross margin planning, account reconciliation, and S&OP. The platform allows users to easily review calculated contract rebates on past sales and accurately forecast future rebates. 

Additionally, our client now has the capability to perform “what-if” scenario analysis, comparing multiple versions across simulated market events that, if not modeled, would render planning forecasts obsolete. By integrating sales and operations planning to automatically intake readily available data from demand planning forecasts, S&OP reporting is streamlined with real-time data, which further facilitates a connection between demand, manufacturing, and inventory analysis. 

The burden of manual work has been significantly eased and replaced with a dynamic end user experience through intuitive dashboards, creating a space for developing meaningful data insights. Through integration, attention to detail, and empowering the users behind the data, we achieved a solution that cleaned and energized the planning process.