A major postal company in Australia decided to switch to a driver-based planning approach after modernizing its financial systems and processes. The aim was to get greater transparency into underlying assumptions and drivers of performance, gain the ability to analyze corporate plans faster, and enable real-time recalculations of forecasts and budgets.
Technology provider Tridant recommended that the company's spreadsheet-based planning and forecasting processes be replaced with IBM Cognos TM1. The software automated manual tasks and provided real time recalculations, dramatically shortening timeframes to recut the budget and allowing better and quicker business decisions. An early success was the identification of higher fixed costs than the company had previously budgeted for.
The new budgeting and forecasting solution is also enabling the company to gain clear insight into the business, with accurate reporting of costs and revenues. Communication between business units is allowing reallocation of labor among them, saving company resources.
Contents
- Background
- The challenge
- The solution
- The benefits
