Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting
The integrated financial planning solution brings many clear, quantifiable benefits. These include high efficiency gains, significantly reduced manual effort through automation, clear time advantages, greater agility and scalability as well as more precise forecasts. According to feedback from Avolta, the planning application is user-friendly and easy to understand, even for specialist users.
The company
Avolta was established in 2023 as a result of the business combination between Dufry and Autogrill, creating the largest travel retail, convenience and F&B company on the Swiss stock exchange, headquartered in Basel. The company operates more than 5,100 points of sale worldwide, spanning 73 countries. These shops are located at airports, motorways, cruise ships, ferries, at train stations, and border crossings. The corporate holding includes well-known brands such as Dufry, Autogrill, HMSHost, Hudson, World Duty Free, Nuance Group and others.
Further information can be found on the Avolta company page.
Challenge
Establishing a global, high performance, comprehensive and sophisticated forecasting and budgeting solution.
Consulting approach
Design, conception and implementation of an integrated financial planning solution based on Anaplan using automated data integration.
Customer benefit and solution
Cost savings through automated integration, improved planning results through real-time calculations, no waiting time for plan changes and more precise budget planning.
Sophie Hälg
Director of Global Controlling at Avolta
”The strong cooperation with valantic was decisive for the great success of the project, not only on a professional, but also on a human level. Everything came together perfectly.“
Sohan Panta
Head of Business Controlling at Avolta
”Together with valantic, we achieved our project goal from project budgeting to roll-out within seven months. 170 employees in 73 countries are already working with the financial planning solution Anaplan, achieving significant time and cost savings.“
Establishing a global, high performance, comprehensive and sophisticated forecasting and budgeting solution.
The previous solution was slow in data processing and complicated due to a lot of manual work required to operate and maintain. Key components such as visibility in the form of dashboards, driver model capabilities and predictive features were missing.
Modernizing the old system would have required an even more significant investment than the current project. Doubts regarding feasibility arose within the management. Therefore, Anaplan was selected to transition towards a newer and state-of-the-art technology.
Significant cost savings through automated integration into the system landscape.
Real-time calculations improve the planning experience.
No more waiting time for plan changes. This has significantly accelerated the planning cycle.
Driver tree approach enables more precise budget planning.
Default values for the planning horizon increase efficiency and reduce effort.
The central data source for accounting data is the SAP Central Finance Group Reporting Module (CFIN GR). Additional data sources for OPEX & CAPEX planning, as well as workforce planning, are connected. A data warehouse (DWH) serves as a middle layer for interfacing to and from Anaplan. Forecast and budget results are exported from Anaplan to the DWH after every planning cycle iteration for reporting purposes in Microsoft Power BI.
The planning model itself is designed as a driver tree model, where defined building blocks such as net sales, COGS, CAPEX, OPEX, etc., feed as financial statement items into the profit & loss, the balance sheet and the cash flow.
This calculation flow is highly automated by a set of business rules, defined for each building block. For example, the moment you change a CAPEX project value, you see the immediate impact on the depreciations in the P&L and the effect on the cash flow.
Same is valid for the intercompany resolution. A receivable from a ruling entity is automatically considered on the payable side of the counterpart entity.
The driver model is complemented by suggestion values for the planning horizon, which can be overwritten, and what-if and scenario capabilities. This setup results in significant effort savings, increased agility, scalability and higher planning quality throughout the entire forecasting and planning processes.
Customer feedback: High satisfaction among management because the planning solution realized by valantic enables better and more successful business decisions.
Precise, targeted forecasts
Powerful, high-performance planning
Significant time and cost savings, with considerably lower effort
Smart, successful business decisions
David Mandl
Senior Manager at valantic
”Through a complex pipeline and tight timelines, the team's collaboration was the cornerstone of delivering the solution on time and within budget.“
In the first foundation phase, we established the project management framework, started with deep dives on the building blocks, and worked on the automated data integration in parallel. The size of the core team was six people. The extended team included around 15 people, though with varying levels of intensity. As is typical in agile project setups, the core team met in daily stand ups to align and resolve impediments. A sprint length was two weeks, concluding with a review / retrospective planning session.
The project was clearly and tightly conceived from the very beginning to meet expectations, resource and time constraints. For this, the valantic project implementation framework was used, providing flexible guidance throughout the entire project lifecycle.
In the second main implementation phase the valantic team was closely working with the Avolta product owner and subject matter experts to align on all details of the build activities.
After a few months, a first minimum viable product (MVP) was deployed and tested under real-world conditions to validate assumptions and gather end-user feedbacks. These were then subsequently considered during the further work towards a marketable product.
After around seven months, the second version of the application was used for the budget 2024 exercise. Approximately 170 Avolta controllers around the world now use the Anaplan application for planning. A particular challenge was that the initial project scope focused only on the Avolta travel retail business. An additional request came in at short notice to also cover the Food & Beverage (F&B) part, including ad hoc data loads and combined analysis at the group level.
The integrated financial planning solution introduced by valantic generates many clear, quantifiable advantages. These include high efficiency gains, significantly reduced manual efforts through automation, clear time advantages, higher agility and scalability, and more precise forecasts. According to feedback from Avolta, the planning application is user-friendly and quickly understood by specialist users.
Download Case Study "Global budgeting & forecasting for thousands of stores at Avolta"
Learn how integrated financial planning solution Anaplan Avolta has brought many clear, quantifiable benefits.
Marc Philipp
Managing Director & Partner