TRANS AUSTRIA GASLEITUNG GMBH STREAMLINES THE BUDGETING AND PLANNING PROCESS WITH SAP BUSINESS PLANNING & CONSOLIDATION (BPC)

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1 TRANS AUSTRIA GASLEITUNG GMBH STREAMLINES THE BUDGETING AND PLANNING PROCESS WITH SAP BUSINESS PLANNING & CONSOLIDATION (BPC) About Our Client Trans Austria Gasleitung GmbH (TAG) is a Transmission System Operator and the main artery of the natural gas network in central Europe, with a pipeline network of about 1,140 km high-pressure natural gas pipes across Austrian borders. TAG lives out its responsibility as an integral part of the European natural gas infrastructure by taking care of the secure and reliable energy transportation through Central Europe around the clock.

2 Executive Summary Trans Austria Gasleitung moved from an Excel based budgeting and planning process to an integrated financial planning solution based on SAP Business Planning and Consolidation. The new solution integrates data from several sources to enable actual, budget & forecast reporting of income statement and cash flows, as well as investment projects and HR costs. Through the implementation, they have seen gains in efficiency of their workforce, improvements to their forecast accuracy and a reduction of time spent in the end-to-end planning cycle time. Challenges Until 2016, the Accounting Finance Controlling (AFC) team at Trans Austria Gasleitung GmbH (TAG) managed critical business processes including the company s revenue planning, cash flow, investment projects and cost budgeting (including HR and related costs) using Microsoft Excel. Users across the organization belonging to different departments (such as human resources, information technology, procurement, etc...) would collect actuals related to their corresponding functions and manage their forecasts in individual sets of excel files that they would then consolidate and submit to the AFC by department. From here, the AFC team had to consolidate all of the data they received from the other departments in order to manage their forecast. Although the scenario was manageable, it was lacking in flexibility, control and automation. The integrated nature of the involved processes meant a careful attention to detail was required from each of the nearly 40 team members who needed to input their planning data and actuals. Fragile links between spreadsheets, multiple data sources and several hands in the pot posed a certain degree of risk to the integrity of data generated. Furthermore, when comparing actual versus planned data, TAG noted considerable discrepancies leading them to question if the process was efficient as it could be. Being a company that places a high value in responsibility and quality, TAG knew they needed to improve current scenario if they wanted a sustainable process for managing their financial budgeting and planning.

3 The Solution TAG selected SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) after careful consideration of the leading tools in the market. As an SAP centric company, BPC would integrate with their existing landscape simpler than other tools, remove the need to manage any disconnected excel files and be a familiar front end interface to their business users. The solution leverages SAP BPC on SAP Netweaver Web, which allows users to access their application from a single point of entry on the web. From here, each user according to their role in the organization, is presented with a Business Process Flow which indicates the actions they need to take in every planning area (OPEX, CAPEX, HR count, etc...). After selecting the relevant business process flow, the solution drives users to manage planning & budgeting activities by leveraging data entry forms, business rules, pre-built curves and automatically saves results in a central database, thereby removing the need to manually pass various sheets from one user group to another. In just four months, TAG was able to turn on a fully integrated planning and budgeting process. Their BPC solution allows them to manage revenue forecasting using a price x quantity approach, operating expenses and allocations. The resulting outcome is a full P&L forecast, balance sheet and cash flow. Furthermore, they are also using their BPC solution to manage headcount, HR costs and CAPEX planning, which they use to calculate the forecast on the full-life of investments. A common model has been developed to manage forecast and budget, adding a degree of automation to the whole process, lending to higher accuracy while decreasing the manual activities and time to plan. Having one single system and point of reference to calculate, query, forecast, report and analyze their financial and controlling data has provided TAG with the security, efficiency and accuracy their Excel based solution could not provide.

4 How The Solution Helped With their integrated financial planning and budgeting solution based on SAP BPC, TAG is realizing several benefits, including: Significantly higher quality of forecasts in their 3 to 5 year mid term planning and ten year business plans. Flexibility in analysis & data discovery enabled by the ability to manage different data types (Opex, Capex, HR cost) and versions of any given planning scenario, allowing users to reveal risks or trends in their data. A better understanding of the tasks required or pending for specific users thanks to the introduction of business process flows. Fully auditable environment with a higher degree of traceable activity that helps to ensure the planning process and data is meaningful. Thanks to the use of a familiar and friendly user interface, the planning process is intuitive allowing new users to learn how to use the tool quickly. Results, ROI & Future Plans After implementing an integrated budgeting and financial planning solution, TAG has experienced significant gains including: 15% forecast accuracy 25% reduction in total planning cycle time (from start to end of the entire process) From 40 days to 30 days lapsed time between open and close of a cycle In the next phase, TAG plans to further exploit their SAP BPC investment with a more detailed operations planning model, diffusion of ad-hoc reports to users and controllers and fine tuning of business rules.

5 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrea Cavalli Performance Management Practice Manager Andrea is a performance management practice manager in Techedge. His work focuses on supporting CFO s in gaining better business insights and optimizing performances through the application of data-driven services and solutions. Throughout his career, Andrea has worked for several leading consulting companies covering important projects in the areas of Corporate Finance, Performance Management and Business Intelligence for clients in various sectors. Andrea is also an active writer on finance themes, with several publications exploring the role and challenges of the CFO in the digital age. At Techedge, our mission is to help companies become more agile by exploiting the value of IT throughout every stage of their business transformation. We provide business solutions and IT services that combine pragmatic business vision and excellent IT delivery capabilities, with a lean, trust-based approach. With over 1,500 professionals worldwide, we offer our clients the scalability of a global provider, the flexibility of a local partner, and the competence of a strategic, trusted advisor. Thank you to Trans Austria Gasleitung GmbH for authorizing the content and pictures to develop this case study.