Planning by numbers

The challenge

A multinational company selling fast-moving consumer goods in 191 countries with 400+ brands and annual revenues of more than €50 billion needed to enhance their ability to identify areas of opportunity or risk in its 5 to 10 year strategic plans in both its current and adjacent categories and markets. The existing process (using spreadsheets and presentation software to create and share the analysis with senior stakeholders) for validating its strategy and long-range planning assumptions against global growth projections across both the markets and categories it operates in, was highly manual, time-consuming, and difficult to digest.
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The solution

Working with the strategy team to understand the business requirements the strategy and analysis application was configured so it provides guided analysis, answering critical business questions that support the company’s strategic decision-making.

Designed to support long-range (5-10 years) strategic analysis and planning the application included the following features:

• A single application integrating internal and external and historical and forecast data sets.
• Historical financial performance in the context of external economic, category and competitor data to determine relative market share.
• A combination of historical actuals, and economic and category growth forecasts to highlight areas of opportunity and calculate implied future revenues across geographies and product lines based on defined methodologies.

Using the application, users can automatically publish 45 different pages of targeted analysis across over 100 countries segmented by region and developing vs developed markets, as well as across 15 product categories which would otherwise need to be created on a case-by-case basis using Microsoft Excel. This has not only reduced the time taken to produce the analysis, but has also delivered both an improved user and process experience for both the analyst and stakeholder.

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