Abstract
As DFE Pharma’s business complexity increased and is operating globally with unique local developments, Excel-based planning processes could no longer keep pace with growing data volumes, multiple source systems and the need for forward-looking insights. By implementing Board, DFE Pharma digitalized budgeting, financial forecasting and reporting within a single unified platform. The result is a centralized, reliable planning environment that improves efficiency, enhances collaboration across departments and enables driver-based simulations to support faster, more informed decision-making.
Why This Story Matters
DFE Pharma demonstrates how a pharmaceutical manufacturer managing hundreds of SKUs and thousands of customers across multiple ERP systems with physical presence all around the globe can move beyond spreadsheet-based forecasting towards unified planning.
- Replaced Excel-driven consolidation across Finance and Sales with a single governed platform
- Unified rolling forecasts and budgeting into one structured process
- Combining top-down strategic guidance with bottom-up operational detail, facilitated with workflows for input by multiple stakeholders, increased the quality and realism of the yearly budget
- Delivering monthly rolling forward looking profitability-data at company level, but also at lower organizational levels for 18 months ahead
- Performed scenario analysis by simulating changes in the sensitivity of overall company performance to its business drivers
- Enabled Finance to directly consume operational data without manual reconciliation
This story highlights how unified financial planning creates control, scalability and cross-functional alignment in complex, multi-system environments.
Key Learnings
- Spreadsheets do not scale with SKU, customer and system complexity.
Managing hundreds of SKUs, thousands of customers and multiple data sources and stakeholders from all around the globe in Excel, created governance risks and inefficiencies that required a structured platform approach.
- Rolling forecasts and budgets must operate in one unified environment.
Separating them increased reconciliation effort and reduced transparency across departments.
- Finance must directly consume operational outputs.
Connecting Sales-data to financial planning eliminated time-consuming manual handovers.
- Future and historical data connected to source systems must be available in one environment.
Not having this data available in one environment required reconciliation, copying and uploading data in different systems and has modelling-inefficiencies.
- Self-service capability drives long-term value.
Empowering business users without complex scripting-language ensures scalability and continuous improvement.
The Company
DFE Pharma is a leading global provider of excipient solutions for the pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries. Its products are critical components in drug formulations, supporting functions such as filling, binding, disintegration and the controlled release of active ingredients to ensure safety and effectiveness.
With over 100 years of expertise, about 450 employees worldwide and delivering in more than 100 countries, DFE Pharma supports over thousand customers globally. It operates production facilities in the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand and India, supported by physical presence in Germany, the United States, Singapore, Japan, India, Brazil and China.
The Challenge: Excel at Its Limits in a Complex, Data-Driven Environment
Initially with forecasting, DFE Pharma was primarily looking at the volumes for the coming month. Over the past 7 years the forecasting-requirements increased from “volumes for the coming month” to “volumes for the Year To Go” to “financials for the Year-To-Go”. Excel supported these requirements to the extent this was possible, however, with a growing number of SKUs and customers and an increasing forecast-period spreadsheets became increasingly large, complex and difficult to maintain. Furthermore, the absence of a streamlined budgeting process and digitalized workflows meant that manual updates, version control issues, reconciliation challenges, lengthy calculations and multiple circulated spreadsheets without clear governance consumed significant time and increased the risk of errors.
Financial Forecasting Complexity at DFE Pharma
DFE Pharma’s forecasting process required the consolidation of operational and financial inputs across multiple systems:
In-Month Forecast (Monthly Basis)
Prepared during the first days of the same month, based on:
- Sales orders
- Cost prices
- Input from Logistics
- SAP transactional data
Full-Year Forecast (Monthly Basis)
Built using:
- Year-to-date actuals (SAP)
- Year-to-go volumes from Demand Planning System (OMP)
- Sales prices from sales contracts, orders and actuals
- Forward looking cost prices maintained in Excel
With hundreds of SKUs and customers and a multi-currency global environment, this process required extensive manual consolidation and reconciliation in Excel, significantly increasing workload and risk of inconsistencies.
Multiple ERPs, manual processes and lack of functionality
At the same time, financial planning depended on data from multiple systems, including SAP, Demand Planning System, Navision and logistics inputs. Excel was no longer able to effectively bridge these data sources or align Finance with other departments. Detailed monthly and full-year forecasting required extensive manual consolidation of actuals, sales orders, volumes and cost prices. Furthermore, the organization lacked the ability to perform driver-based simulations, limiting forward-looking insights and scenario analysis. As business complexity grew, it became clear that spreadsheet-based processes could no longer provide the level of accuracy, speed and cross-functional collaboration DFE Pharma required.
Closing the gap in a budget process between top down targets and bottom up input was very inefficient, time-consuming and happened many times under pressure. Defining a Top Down Target setting-process and a Bottom Up process in Board at meaningful data aggregation levels with all global stakeholders involved, led to the situation that there was always real-time insight in the gap between Top Down Targets and Bottom Up input leading to early high quality discussions on the gap and on which actions should be taken to close the gap.
Loek Fraaije
The Solution: Unified Planning to Connect Forecasting, Budgeting and Future Performance
Why DFE Pharma selected Board
During the evaluation phase, DFE Pharma required proof that the solution could handle high data volumes and integrate seamlessly with existing systems. Board demonstrated:
- Direct connection to data from SAP, OMP and Microsoft Navision
- Performance handling of large data volumes
- A self-service, no-scripting philosophy, empowering business users
- A structured implementation methodology with early project team involvement
- A Proof of Concept built on real data
Board was selected over other planning platforms based on its flexibility, scalability and collaborative implementation approach.
Implementing a unified platform
DFE Pharma selected Board to create a more integrated and forward-looking planning environment—one capable of seamlessly connecting forecasting, budgeting and reporting within a single platform. By digitalizing financial budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes, the company moved away from fragmented tools toward a centralized and unified environment that combines historical data and forward-looking plans in one consistent system.
Rather than treating forecasting and budgeting as separate, sequential activities, Board enables DFE Pharma to align them within a single platform. Forecasts are no longer isolated financial exercises; instead, the financial budget has evolved into a shared forecast with Sales, strengthening cross-functional collaboration and improving alignment between commercial expectations and financial targets.
At the core of the solution is a unified planning approach connecting Sales, Supply Chain and Finance within a single-governed platform. Board integrates multiple data sources and handles high—and continuously increasing—data volumes, ensuring robust performance and scalability. Operational output from Sales and Supply Chain can now feed directly into financial planning with minimal manual intervention. This significantly improves efficiency, reduces reconciliation efforts and makes the budget and forecast processes more structured and reliable.
Board also enables advanced planning capabilities, including driver-based simulations and scenario analysis. Users can model the financial impact of changing assumptions, product launches, or cost variations in real time. By embedding these capabilities into workflows, DFE Pharma can respond faster to market changes and make more informed strategic decisions.
The ability to perform driver-based simulations and to be able to easily compare multiple forecasts and planning scenarios from one source gives us a lot of information on how the business and forecast develop. Therefore, we can immediately see the financial impact of changes instead of relying on static spreadsheets and the need to compile data from multiple data sources.
Loek Fraaije
Self-Sufficiency for future development
An equally important outcome has been the development of internal expertise. Throughout the implementation, knowledge and competencies were built within DFE Pharma’s team, increasing self-sufficiency in Board and enabling continuous enhancement of the planning environment without heavy external dependency. The development of internal expertise was supported by additional instructor-led “Board-Developer-trainings” after the implementation by Board specialists via the Board Academy which ensures that expertise is kept up to date.
By unifying forecasting, budgeting, reporting and simulation in one scalable platform, Board now supports DFE Pharma’s planning needs today while providing a strong foundation for future growth and complexity.
One of the biggest strengths of Board is that we can develop and enhance it ourselves. The self-service philosophy means we’re not dependent on IT or external support for every single change.
Loek Fraaije
The Benefits: A Single Source of Truth Driving Speed, Efficiency and Autonomy
By implementing Board, DFE Pharma has significantly improved the way financial and operational data is managed, analyzed and shared across the organization. The unified platform connects departments and systems into a single source of truth, eliminating inconsistencies and manual reconciliation efforts while accelerating key planning and reporting processes.
By automating our processes in Board, we have in every first week of a month an updated overview of the estimated financial company performance for the next 18 months ahead at multiple organizational levels. That allows senior leadership to focus more on strategic decision making, it allows colleagues at physically different locations in the world to see the financial impacts of their local business decisions and allows Finance to support the business by means of preparing simulations and scenario analyses instead of manually consolidating data.
Loek Fraaije
Key benefits include:
- Reduced manual effort and faster processes are the levers to focus more on value-adding tasks:
Automation replaced time-consuming manual activities shortening the planning cycle duration from 16 weeks to 8 weeks with increased data quality—representing a 50% acceleration of the overall planning process and with more time for analyses. Variance analysis report generation can be based on every single scenario and doesn’t need to be rebuild every time a different scenario is used which creates a lot of efficiency. By significantly shortening reporting and analysis processes, teams can now focus more on value-adding tasks and strategic decision-making.
- Improved data consistency and transparency:
By consolidating data from multiple systems into one platform, DFE Pharma ensures consistent, reliable information across departments, supporting better and faster decision-making.
- Greater user autonomy through self-service analytics:
Finance and business users can now perform their own analyses and build reports independently, reducing dependency on IT and increasing responsiveness to business questions.
- Scalable and future-proof platform:
Board’s flexibility enables DFE Pharma to continuously enhance models and processes internally, supporting evolving business requirements without complex technical development.
Overall, Board has empowered DFE Pharma with a more agile, efficient and user-driven planning and analytics environment—laying the foundation for sustained performance improvements and future growth.
Over time, as the organization refined and simplified its internal budgeting processes, the Board environment was adjusted accordingly—demonstrating its flexibility to adapt to evolving management needs. Today, DFE Pharma is actively using the solution, independently building reports and looking to further expand its capabilities.
Quentin Leemans
Conclusion
DFE Pharma’s transformation demonstrates how replacing spreadsheet-driven processes with a unified planning platform can unlock greater efficiency, transparency and strategic agility. By combining forecasting, budgeting, reporting and scenario analysis in Board, the company established a single source of truth that supports cross-functional collaboration and data-driven decision-making. With a scalable foundation and growing internal expertise, DFE Pharma is now well positioned to manage increasing complexity and drive future growth with confidence.
