Success story

Leverage Workiva and Anaplan to automate dozens of FP&A and demand planning reports

By Sergio Escobar & Andrew Onufrychuk

Background

When a front-line service provider was experiencing hyper growth during the pandemic, they encountered several challenges when deciding on:

1. How, when, and where they should invest and grow their business operations?

2. What impact will their decisions have across multiple business lines?

3. How should they manage their business and align resources around that impact and other uncertainties?

The business directors knew that the organization needed to leverage data and technology to overcome these challenges.

Challenge

We helped our client identify three specific needs for leveraging data to optimize their decision-making:

1. First, they needed to connect all levels of data across all departments in real time to enable enhanced planning.

2. Second, they needed to automate all reports to include the financial impact of changes on critical value drivers.

3. Third, they would need to enhance data integrity and security across all systems. Approach

We worked closely with this organization to truly understand their current state and define their target state. Our unique approach of leading with enablement and building together allowed us to optimize the best fit cloud-based solutions for their desired target state.

Keyrus collaborated with this organization to build and deploy customized Anaplan models for FP&A and Demand planning. These models integrated data from multiple sources and provided a central platform for calculating and visualizing all changes to critical value drivers.

There was still one major manual labor requirement. Multiple resources were still required to manually export data from Anaplan and update each narrative and exhibit within their management reports. This is where we leveraged Workiva for automated end-to-end integration and reporting.

Results

• Empowered the organization to rapidly expand operations by opening dozens of new locations in 2021.

• Automated the importing, exporting, and building of over 40 management reports.

• What previously required 3 analysts a total of 15 days per month is now completed by 1 analyst in 1 day with Workiva!

Benefits

The client now benefits from end-to-end automation from planning to reporting to ensure real-time data integrity and security across the entire data ecosystem. This included data from sources like ERP, HRM, CRMs, and other systems, enhancing accuracy in data and reducing collaborative friction and risk of human error.