The customer is the world’s leading kitchen and laundry appliance company, with approximately $20 billion in annual sales. Being a global player, the organization employs 77,000 employees and runs close to 60 manufacturing and technology research centers across the globe. With a vision to become the best kitchen & laundry company, our customer markets some of the most established and successful brand names in nearly every country throughout the world.
For every major consumer durable organization, a holistic and closely-knitted Enterprise Performance Management process is not only the backbone of its short to long-term strategy and planning but also sets the right course of growth momentum for the company.
Back in 2003, our customer had implemented an Enterprise Performance Management solution based on Anaplan. The the solution was intended to support their entire Sales and Operations Planning process. It was evident to the a customer that post-implementation, there is a need to onboard a partner who has the ability to not just ramp-up and ramp-down resources in an ultra-flexible manner but also support the entire competency required to support the S&OP process based on Anaplan.
The critical success factor for managed services support was to have a partner who had extensive experience in the EPM domain and also the functional and technical prowess around Anaplan. The customer post the evaluation process chose Polestar as their trusted Managed Support Services partner.
For an organization like that of our customers, an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM_ process sets the rhythm of their business. The processes encompass a few sub-processes that are critical for every organization in order to underpin the overarching Financial and Operational Planning such as – Planning Budgeting, Forecasting. The customer was leveraging Anaplan to handle Demand Planning using different SKUs of their lines of products. At the very foundation of EPM, lies the performance measurements, analytics, and reporting – which in turn complements this process as in helping the organizations stay abreast with the sales performance. This again was critical to our customer – being directly related to financial planning and operations.
Having implemented the Anaplan-based EPM solution, our customer realized there is an immediate and dire need to align a managed support service to underpin the entire S&OP process now being done in Anaplan. Soon, it was evident that there was inconsistent and inaccurate information being thrown by the Anaplan based analytics and reporting engine. On the other hand, there was consistent demand for making changes and enhancements to the existing Anaplan solutioning order to keep-up with the changing business requirements.
Operationally, it was not easy for the customer to get the complete support for the existing support team. Owing to the fact that supporting an Anaplan-based EPM solution requires a healthy mix of domain and functional prowess over and beyond the technical expertise.
Below were the key business and operational challenges that the customer faced:
They were facing significantly low forecast accuracy and were unable to pinpoint the root cause through their process consultants
Absence of comprehensive and integrated Analytics covering end-to-end supply chain process and sales
Limited means to keep a real-time tab on performance, demand etc.
Substantial reliance on manual interventions and lack of automation
Effort-intensive maintenance of data in excels
Limited view into historical trends and changes
For the team at Polestar it was apparent that they had to get to the very root of the problems in order to address the challenges that the customer faced. In order to arrive at the right situational diagnosis and analysis, the team at Polestar conducted the study of the applications which need to be supported and enhanced.
Addressing the challenge required not just the domain SMEs and functional experts but also the technical skill-set targeting Anaplan as the base platform. Hence, Polestar proposed a team with a healthy blend of diverse skill-set required:
A strong domain capability on sales and operation planning applied to Global and large organization,
Process analysts and model builder with the expertise
to understand sales and planning processes and build the right data models
to configure the right sales planning and budgeting process with multiple products and myriad of SKUs
Functional and technical expertise for the targeted Anaplan platform
After a detailed functional analysis of the Clients S&OP Process, Polestar came up with the right mix of PM, Solution Architect, Model Builders and SME. The team, once on the ground, commenced with the assessment and analysis of the existing processes, systems, business logics, forecasting models and reports. Below were key findings emanated from the exercise:
The deeper analysis of the forecast model - including the statistical formulae – helped bring out and pinpoint multiple issues in the existing business logics that were implemented
Based on an extensive audit of the complete system and identified KPIs, the team provided actionable insights into the Efficacy of the S&OP Process.
Our S&OP Subject Matter Experts helped in refining and enhancing existing S&OP Model
The competency that Polestar established for the customer provided the following value-additions:
End to end management of the support process
Acting as a liaise with Business/Tech teams
Help business users in addressing the supply chain concerns through regular interactions with the business stakeholders
Leverage substantially the existing knowledge and building upon that to enhance and improve the system
A strong domain capability on sales and operation planning applied to Global and large organization,
Forecast accuracy of the models in question had a 20% additional improvement on the top-level aggregated forecast.
Built an entire new model in Anaplan to measure relevant KPI's in their S&OP Process
less excess and obsolescence 15%-10 inventory, Visibility into all products at one time in one view. Customer Service Levels had drastically improved
A 8X7 Weekend support to support the senior management while they access reports on weekends
A whopping 40% reduction of the operational cost
Reimagining the operating model to assimilate consulting business and related processes in order to align with business strategies and data needs
