Suntory draws deep from BOARD’s well of Business Intelligence

Every year Suntory Australia creates an annual budget to forecast business expectations for the year ahead. Monthly budgets are revised to reflect any changes in circumstances. Until recently the process was supported by a Cognos software solution, but David Moore, General Manager, Finance & Operations, Suntory Australia says, “We found it was quite slow for our needs. It really wasn’t giving us flexibility in reporting or the ability to drill down to the level that we needed.”

Cognos required a great deal of effort to support and technical in-house expertise, making it cumbersome to complete. Whenever a product changed, the company had to engage external consultants to make the accompanying changes in the system. Because of the time it took, insights were delayed and occasionally, as with any manual process, accuracy suffered.

Just as importantly, the process was inconsistent. Vital market and customer performance data was not always incorporated into the budgeting process. At times this led to forecasts that were out of touch with market realities, for example, by failing to reflect an oversupply during slowing consumer demand.

Fixing a slow and difficult process

Fifteen months ago Suntory management decided to improve the budgeting and forecasting process, and to create a business intelligence capability that would help users gain greater insight from the data.

Specifically, Suntory wanted a 70 per cent or more reduction in the resources (such as people, time and effort) required to build a budget and subsequent monthly forecasts. It wanted a system that would support a rolling 12 month budget, enable comparisons between budgets and forecasts, and be able to carry out “what if” budget and forecast analyses on the fly. A drill through capability from summary level to individual transactions was essential. The system would also have to foster consistency in the use of market and customer performance data and provide insightful management reports.

After a thorough market investigation, Suntory selected BOARD, a business intelligence and corporate performance management solution. Professional Advantage were selected as their implementation partner, to build and deploy the solution. “BOARD seemed to have the greatest capability to put the power for future development into our hands, as opposed to being at the hands of outsourced consultants,” Moore explains. “I liked the way Professional Advantage said they would work with us to build that internal capability. We had a feeling that Professional Advantage would be flexible and they were willing to work with us to make us independent over time, to help us learn from them as the system was being built.”

To avoid overwhelming users with too much change, the project was divided into three phases. First was a budgeting and forecasting capability to replace existing functionality. Second, dashboards and reporting would be developed to replace the manually-generated spreadsheets used throughout the business. Finally, Suntory would begin to tap into the intelligence of its new system to gain insight into all aspects of the business.

Implementation

Phase 1, budgeting and forecasting, began in early 2013 and was completed on time, four months later.

“With the help of Professional Advantage we ended up with more functionality than we had before. From a user perspective, it’s been a huge benefit,” Moore says. “Among the data we collect are key indicators of what’s going on in the marketplace. In the past we could never be sure whether brand managers or state managers were looking at this as they prepared their forecasts. Now BOARD pulls this information out and puts it on the input screen. We know managers are seeing the data and they don’t have to rely solely on gut feel.”

Phase two, dashboards and reporting, will see the introduction of dashboards to replace spreadsheets, and a complete revamp of reports to be completed within the next few months.

“This is an opportunity for us to look at the reports we produce, to decide what we actually need and rationalise the output. We’re removing the majority of spreadsheets and removing the replication of data across the business. That’s where we will leverage the value and see a fast ROI [return on investment] on the system. We want BOARD to be the central, consistent repository of information” Moore explains.

Phase 3, business intelligence, will begin in mid 2014. “Phase 3 is when we start to apply the intelligence of BOARD to gain insights and to improve the quality and accuracy of our budgeting and forecasting. Time spent producing the data can now be spent gaining insights from it instead. We’ll be able to see and understand why there may be variances between trends and what’s being put into the system”, Moore enthuses.

For example, although managers are presented with market data when they enter their forecast or budget, there is no process for validating a managers’ figures if they differ markedly from the market data. Once BOARD’s BI capabilities are rolled out, the system will automatically query any forecast that falls outside a certain range of the expected figures.

Moore is confident this will improve the integrity of data being put into the system by managers and will lead to better forecasting. Improved forecasting is a significant step that will help to reduce the amount of stock held in the warehouse and improve cash flow. It will also help to avoid oversupplying the market, an outcome that leads to unanticipated discounting.