Company
BTC Specialty Chemical Distribution is the European sales organization that carries out the trading activities in specialty chemicals produced by the BASF Group. BTC, comprising nine BASF subsidiaries, is an expert in specialty chemicals, specifically refined chemicals and polymers. As a leader in the industry, responding to the demands and requirements of the market, BTC offers its customers customized system solutions that strongly increase their level of competitiveness.

Business Challenges
Planning the sales performance of the individual BTC companies had previously been carried out rather laboriously using individual, complex Excel spreadsheets in each branch office per product and per customer. Therefore the task was to standardize and optimize the complete planning process from end to end. With this goal, the first step was to find a solution that would meet the requirements of the nine European companies in the areas of controlling and sales and marketing, for approximately 200 users.
Here the challenge lay in the time available: for the implementation of this task, only six weeks remained between the project start date and the start date of the planning process. Against this background, the leading vendors of business intelligence solutions and planning software were researched, as were existing planning applications within the group. The possibility of expanding the existing Navision solution with custom programming by the system vendor was also evaluated.

Business Solution
It quickly became clear that the flexible toolkit approach from BOARD. was best suited to meeting, and exceeding the requirements for planning and analysis. As the development environment was one which did not involve any programming, SDG Consulting AG was able to not only guarantee that the system would be ready to go live on time, but also offer a significantly lower maintenance requirement and a considerably longer guaranteed future when compared to a programmed solution.
After the requirements of the various international group members had been assimilated, the new planning process was designed. A top-down/bottom-up planning approach was chosen. As a first step the initial parameters and objectives were specified on an aggregated level by management and the central controlling department. The sales directors of the individual BTC companies then conducted the planning on a detailed level – per product and customer – in order to use this detail as a basis to negotiate the final budget to which they would be bound.
SDG Consulting AG began designing the international budgeting tool with the intention of supporting both the individual employees in planning the budget and providing the managers in each country with up-to-the-minute results and budgets for monitoring and steering. In addition, to support the future expansion of capabilities and offer truly comprehensive analysis and planning, all relevant data was transferred from MBS-Navision into BOARD’s multi-dimensional database. The data is scheduled to automatically update each night. This way, when starting the top-down plan all historical and current data from the product groups concerning volume, price, sales turnover and margin is available for management in one overview, including forecasts and deviations. The top-down plan can be commenced at any time using a navigation bar that guides the users through the entire process.
There are several choices available with regard to planning: By entering an incremental factor the previous year’s annual figures can be increased as a percentage in total or by group. In addition, concrete planning figures can be entered top-down per reporting unit or product group and automatically broken down by the system to each level below. The detailed effects of the planning on lower levels, such as individual products or customers, can thus be analyzed at any time by a simple click of the mouse using the drill-down function.

Business Benefit
When all the planning steps have been completed, the final version of the top-down plan forms the basis for the subsequent bottom-up plan carried out by the sales directors. They start creating the budgets at the lowest level – by customer or product. The up-to-date product and customer overviews and the predefined input tables simplify the planning process. If for example, the volume, the price and the margin per product is revised for a certain customer, the turnover at all levels is automatically adjusted. Due to the multi-dimensional representation of all relevant data, the effects of certain planned values on other areas are immediately simulated and revised, if required. The standardized budgeting tool for all nine European branches noticeably simplified the planning process and considerably increased the level of transparency and commitment to the plan both for management and for the individual BTC companies. Clearly defining and revising the planning process was also an important result realized by the introduction of the solution. An extension of the system into the controlling departments of the individual BTC group companies is already in progress.

BOARD Partner
SDG Consulting AG is a management consultancy specializing in business intelligence with a focus on designing and realizing Windows-based and web-compatible management information systems based on multi-dimensional OLAP databases.