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Absolut

Case Study

The company was looking for an effective forecasting and budgeting system that was user-friendly as well as being able to easily integrate with their current management system.

Solution category

Absolut is a leading producer of vodka. The company belongs to the Pernod Ricard Group and its headquarters and production facilities are located in Sweden. Absolut Vodka was founded in 1879 and its brand is recognised in 126 countries worldwide. ABSOLUT is a pioneer and leader in flavoured vodkas; offering the widest range of different flavour combinations.

The company required a reliable, efficient budgeting process that was becoming increasingly difficult to manage as the scale of the challenge increased.
Cogit was chosen to carry out this task due to its extensive experience in the industry and recommendations from Wyborowa S.A.

Challenge

The key business issues faced by the solution were to deal with the following cost planning challenges:

- Two Swedish locations working on different planning schedules
- Different business processes for each location (production vs. management and marketing)
- Central cost approach crossed with project management based approach
- Corporate reporting based on different technology platform
- Different currencies used for planning and reporting
- Forecasting without execution was error prone
- Use of different workstations (Windows, Mac)

Solution

Following a needs analysis, the decision was made to implement the Oracle Hyperion Planning solution, delivering the following KPIs identified by Absolut:

- Flexible architecture, based on a central repository,
- Integration with current data warehouse and reporting system based on SQL Server and OBIEE.
- Provides user interface (Windows and Mac), allowing different groups to execute the process with different requirements e.g. different planning calendars; targets, currencies.
- Automatic forecasting based on execution and historical plans, reducing planning cycles.
- Data validation showing potential errors in real time.
- High level of planning detail across accounts, cost centres, projects, brands, customers, currencies and markets for multiple scenarios with the ability to create 'quick' versions.

The entire implementation was completed in 8 weeks.

Results

The implemented solution provides a number of benefits that were not possible with previous systems.

- The entire planning process is driven by business users.
- Each location has its own processes and administrator.
- Hyperion Planning automatically aggregates the final budget (for each separate planning stream), the data feeds the corporate data warehouse for further reporting needs.
- Due to compliance with the design concept, there are no data integrity issues and master data.
- IT support is limited to maintenance activities.
- The system allows analysts to spend more time performing variance analysis and answering ad hoc queries using the powerful planning, forecasting and reporting capabilities of Oracle Hyperion Planning.