International wine grower & distributor

Our client was challenged with pulling together timely information for analysis and planning at corporate offices and across its different business operations globally. The incumbent tool was seen as outdated and cumbersome. It took a lot of time and effort to pull information together, consolidate it and make it available on a common platform for planning and reporting, and there was an over reliance on spreadsheets.

The IT team was tasked with providing an enterprise-wide solution with built-in analytics and reporting that would replace legacy system reporting and planning, and foster independence from IT. They needed a modern, flexible planning, budgeting and reporting solution that would easily integrate with their existing JDE instance.

Additionally, later in the project, the requirement arose for the capability to manage and plan the business’s growing employee headcount and expenses accurately as these grew in complexity.

The client elected to implement Oracle Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS)  with Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS), with Inoapps as its partner. This represents one of the first standalone Oracle SaaS projects in the USA and the very first in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) in that region.

The new platform allows the client’s wineries business and Group Sales & Marketing operations to plan in the same model. The client can also now see aggregate plans with its Export and Commercial business in one place for management reporting. PBCS and BICS have replaced Excel spreadsheets to enable marketing planning across brand lines and SKUs. This has improved the accuracy of cost allocations and effectively enabled ‘margin per SKU’. Plans are more accurate and reporting is standardised across the business.

Oracle PBCS has allowed the client to push responsibility for budget and forecast entry out to Brand Managers and Marketers, while centralising the calculation logic and roll ups such that there is no manual compilation of these “templates” as was the case historically.

Finally, the new solution enables the client to plan its headcount and detailed employee expenses more accurately. This is used for both salaried employees in the Group offices and the hourly workers in their growing business, helping to keep tight control of the associated costs.

The aggregation of planning information has significantly reduced the manual overhead needed for reporting and has led to an increase in planning accuracy. Planning productivity has improved by over 30% whilst reporting productivity has improved by over 20%. This incorporates time savings of over 30% in planning activities and 25% in reporting related activities. Time freed up by these productivity savings has led to an improvement in decision making and therefore the company’s profit margins.

Inoapps installed and deployed the solution rapidly, in less than four months

• Streamlined reporting and planning
• Better decision-making, based on accurate, timely data
• One version of the truth for standardised planning & reporting across the business
• Accurate control of staff planning and costs from permanent employees through to seasonal
  workers
• Immediate consumption of innovation and best practice with automatic upgrades
• Independence from IT
• Ability to quickly scale up activities in the Cloud to support continued growth and new areas of the business