Company
Berendsen is a leading textile rental service company that develops and provides value added textile, hygiene and safety solutions to industries and the public sector. Founded in 1854, today Berendsen Group is present in nine countries with more than 7000 employees.

Through its owner group, Davis Service Group Plc., Berendsen is the only listed company in Europe that is focused on textile rental services in the business-to-business sector.

Business Challenges
Berendsen budgeting process has to respond to complex business requirements and be managed by multiple parameters such as product, country, operational unit, customer, sales representative etc. The process is initiated centrally by Sales; sales forecasts are then passed to the Operation Business Units for operational and costs budgeting. The output of this process, upon which production is planned, is then consolidated in a country P/L budget for the top management in Norway; this is then fed into the Berendsen European budget.

This process has been reliant on MS Excel and its integration with multiple other third party systems (e.g. XL Reporter, Microsoft Enterprise Reporting) for uploading data, reporting, budgeting and consolidating data. It involved manual steps to extract data from the ERP and Data Warehouse, followed by manipulation of the extracts in Excel to produce and reformat a budgeting output; budget data was then manually inputted back into the Data Warehouse.

This manual and time consuming process presented significant challenges: Berendsen Group strategy has moved from a cost-based analysis and planning to a customer and turnover-based one. The existing budgeting process lacked the flexibility to respond to the new business requirements and to deliver the dynamic data analysis and manipulation needed. Moreover, the time and resources required to complete the manual steps slowed productivity down in the departments involved in the process. Manual manipulation of data also opened up to data inaccuracy and limited the flexibility of the process. Another consideration was made around the costs of running and maintaining a complex set of non-integrated systems.

Selection Process & BOARD Solution
In June 2008 Berendsen Norway started a selection process to implement a streamlined budgeting and planning solution that was more efficient and in line with their new business requirements.

OneStop Reporting, an external consultancy company, was chosen to manage the selection process. Thanks to a long-term business relationship with Berendsen Norway, OneStop Repoting has an in-depth knowledge of the Berendsen environment and of their specific business requirements.

A software selection process involving four vendors was undertaken (BOARD, Cognos, Hyperion, Microsoft PerformancePoint) and BOARD was recognised straight away to be a simple and innovative solution to improve efficiency and accuracy by automating the budgeting process.
Longer term Berendsen were looking to extend the footprint of the solution. BOARD’s flexible and integrated Toolkit were key in convincing Berendsen management that BOARD was the best solution. Total Cost of Ownership played a significant role in the selection.

“With BOARD we can now rely on a complete and truly integrated system rather than a suite of stand-alone systems from different vendors interacting awfully together” commented Harald Bugge – CFO of Berendsen Norway “I have to admit, also cost-wise BOARD represents the best solution. With BOARD we get the complete BI & CPM package, so we have the possibility to develop further BI and CPM applications without having to purchase any extra modules”.

Berendsen leverages BOARD capabilities to manage the entire budgeting process. Berendsen cost model is mainly volume-driven; BOARD supports a model where volumes can be calculated based on revenue by customer. In line with their new customer-focused business strategy, it is now easy for Berendsen to manage their budget and P&L by clients.
In addition, through the native simulation features of BOARD (“what if”, “what for”), scenarios can easily be build to evaluate the impact of changing pricing structures on volumes and costs.

The implementation project, managed by BOARD partner of choice SDG Consulting UK, started under tight timelines – Berendsen aimed at using the new budgeting solution to complete their 2009 budget. Moreover, internal resources to be dedicated to the project were limited within Berendsen.

Working closely with Berendsen staff and with OneStop Reporting, the SDG team delivered the project with outstanding results. Key to this result was the accuracy with which the project requirements were agreed and communicated from the very beginning.

Berendsen measures projects success on three parameters: time, scope and money. The BOARD project was successful in all these areas:
“I have had consistently positive reports on all three items throughout the project, and this is the most important thing to us – continues Harald Bugge - I was initially concerned about the ambitious timelines we wanted to achieve and the limited internal resources Berendsen could dedicate to the project. However it has all worked very well with the collaboration of OneStop Reporting and SDG”.

Business Benefit
The implementation of the Budgeting application using BOARD resulted in immediate benefits for Berendsen:

• The budgeting process has been streamlined and efficiency improved. Thanks to the automation of steps and the BOARD intuitive user interface, process timelines have been reduced from weeks to days.
• The simple and flexible BOARD solution allows for more key users to actively give their input to the budgeting process. The result is a dynamic process that produces a more realistic and business-focussed budgeting output.
• “The BOARD budgeting solution has opened the ground to some interesting and dynamical discussions between departments that didn’t use to interact during the process before, e.g. sales, Key Account Managers and Production – says Harald Bugge. What we have now thanks to BOARD is exactly the kind of budgeting process we desired”.
• The elimination of manual steps guarantees consistency in the budgeting process rounds, and comparison and analysis of data is now possible and meaningful. The possibility of data entry and manipulation errors has also been reduced.
• The new programming-free application can be rapidly scaled to support additional users and to meet new requirements.