IBM Planning Analytics & IBM Watson Studio
A1 Telekom has automated its financial planning and significantly increased efficiency by using IBM Planning Analytics and IBM Watson Studio. What used to take a week is now done in a matter of hours, enabling more accurate forecasts and better informed business decisions.
The company
As a leading communications provider in the CEE region, the A1 Group offers products and services in the areas of voice telephony; broadband Internet; mobile and home entertainment; smart home, data, and IT solutions; wholesale and payment solutions; and digital services.
The A1 Group is active in Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. A1 Telekom serves the home market of Austria. In addition, the Group company A1 Digital supports companies in these core markets as well as in Germany and Switzerland on issues relating to digital transformation.
Challenge
A1 Telekom struggled with inefficient processes and manual data analyses, which hampered fast and agile financial planning and forecasting and strategic business planning and slowed down company growth.
Consulting approach
Working with A1, valantic’s team analyzed the possibilities for optimizing financial forecasts and implemented a solution that links IBM Planning Analytics with IBM Watson Studio. This integration enables a fully automated, ML-based forecasting process that significantly increases the efficiency of financial planning and speeds up decision making
Customer benefit and solution
What used to take three weeks now takes just 1 ½ hours. Thanks to a fully automated processing of data from the upstream system and data-driven forecasts at various KPI levels, A1 Telekom can now make more informed decisions and has significantly improved its operational processes.
Mag. Christian Rezek
Head of Group Performance Controlling at A1
”The integration of AI with IBM Planning Analytics can improve planning efficiency and accuracy and allow more users to access valuable business information and recommendations.“
The challenge
Inefficient processes robbed the A1 Telekom team of time and energy: Time-consuming routines, regularly required adjustments, and manual data analysis slowed down the company’s growth and further development. In particular, regular twelve-month forecasts involved a lot of manual effort. There was often no time and a lack of capacity and resources for what-if analyses and strategic business planning.
Solution & results in detail
The answer to the challenges at A1 Telekom was agile financial planning with IBM Planning Analytics and IBM Watson Studio. Thanks to the fully automated processing of data from the upstream system and data-driven forecasts at various KPI levels, A1 Telekom can now make more informed decisions, and it has significantly improved its operational processes.
A1 benefits from the following solutions:
Great efficiency gains, significantly less manual work
Precise, high-performance sales forecasts
Flexible, data-based what-if scenarios
Smart, successful business decisions
Project history
“What used to take a week now takes just 1 ½ hours.”
Each month, the A1 Telekom Group prepares sales forecasts for all sales markets, based on a forecast period of twelve months. Previously, entering, reconciling, and readjusting the data required for this took a full three weeks. This left little time for strategic planning because there wasn’t enough capacity, and this in an industry that needs to react very quickly to unpredictable changes and requirements.
With the financial planning capabilities of IBM Planning Analytics, A1 Telekom’s controlling department automatically plans and forecasts for all sales markets in about 1 ½ hours. The data required for this is uploaded automatically via ETL processes (Extract, Transform, Load) from the ERP system into a multidimensional OLAP data warehouse and then evaluated. For the controllers, the manual work required in the past has largely been eliminated. There is now room for more sophisticated planning and what-if forecasting scenarios in order to support the business activities of the A1 Telekom Group and make optimal decisions. For example, scenarios such as: Energy costs are rising by 20%. What impact will this price increase have on business?
A1 Telekom and valantic work hand in hand
A1 Telekom has a group of controllers with extensive data science expertise. valantic’s experts and consultants helped with specialized topics, for example, the creation of precise forecast models. A1 Telekom has a rather complex business key figure structure. For all business metrics, several models were tested and then the model that provides the best forecasts was selected.
Download Success Story "A1 Telekom optimizes financial planning, analytics and twelve-month forecasting with AI"
Martin W. Vierrath
Senior Sales Manager
valantic Business Analytics