From a stand-alone solution to the group standard.

Planning becomes hard to keep track of wherever many variables build on one another. In investment controlling, capital expenditure, budgets, personnel costs and operating costs were intertwined. If one variable changes, everything else shifts.

The planned investment projects ran into the hundreds of millions. On top of that came hundreds of people involved, assumptions that had to be aligned continuously, queries to project managers and controllers, and the requirements for security, access rights and compliance that apply in a group of this size.

The hardest part was not the technology.

The real effort lay in bringing together many people with conflicting requirements: business departments that calculate differently. Controllers who need different views. Project managers who want as little extra work as possible. Every view was legitimate and still had to fit into one shared model.

A solution that everyone supports is not created at a desk. It emerges when you take every requirement seriously instead of arguing it away. That is why it was built from within the business department and not in the IT department: data model, logic and user interface by the people who had previously run the process themselves.

For that, both sides have to be right. Those who work with it every day need less effort, and management needs figures it can rely on. A solution that serves only one of the two sides does not catch on. Either people work around it, or it is not used.

In the end, it was no longer just a planning tool.

Yes, planning happens in it. But so do analysis, reporting, alignment and approval, in the same system and on the same figures. Transfer errors between spreadsheets no longer exist there, because nothing is transferred any more.

• Planning across all management variables instead of a single one
• Analysis and reporting on the same data, without a second version of the truth
• Alignment and approvals in the system instead of by email
• Guided input with validation rules, so that errors do not arise in the first place
• Reusable building blocks, instead of building each area from scratch
• Connected group sources such as financial and HR data
• AI-supported analysis on a data foundation you can trust
• Access rights, traceability and compliance at corporate group level

It is built in SAP Analytics Cloud. What the individual views look like is shown on the SAP Analytics Cloud page.

From stand-alone solution to group standard

for the complex planning processes in the group

Voluntary adoption

passed on from one division to the next

Hundreds of people involved

in one shared planning model

Hundreds of millions

scale of the planned investment projects

It started as a small, local solution. Over the years it became the group's central standard for complex planning processes. The fact that the solution was adopted voluntarily and passed on from one division to the next was the real outcome. A system that nobody wants to use is not a good system either.

Both can be transferred: the whole thing or a single building block. If all you want is your financial figures presented consistently and reliably, you get exactly that, and you can expand later without starting from scratch.

We do not name the group on this page.