Why This Story Matters
DENSO Europe’s Aftermarket Division transformed its Excel-based planning into an integrated, continuous planning process with Board. The unified platform connects Sales, Supply Chain, and Finance, enabling teams to plan, simulate, and adjust dynamically as new data becomes available. DENSO can continuously refine assumptions, align forecasts with market realities, and react faster to change. This evolution has strengthened collaboration across 48 markets and delivered greater visibility from SKU-level detail to strategic horizons.
Key Benefits:
- Stronger cross-functional and cultural alignment driven by shared planning across product and customer perspectives
- Transparent workflows enhancing collaboration
- Unified data model enabling real-time updates and scenario simulations
- Faster, and more accurate forecasts
- Granular SKU-level visibility into prices, margins, and volumes
The Company
DENSO is a leading global supplier of advanced automotive technology, systems, and components, dedicated to shaping a future of safer, cleaner, and more efficient mobility. With innovation at its core, DENSO develops technologies that reduce environmental impact while enhancing comfort and peace of mind for people everywhere. Today, DENSO’s products and systems power nearly every vehicle make and model on the road, driving progress across the global automotive industry.
The Challenge: Overcoming Excel-driven sales planning inefficiencies
The DENSO Europe Aftermarket Division supplies OE-quality automotive components and services to distributors, wholesalers, and garages, contributing over 40% of DENSO’s total European profit. Operating across 48 European countries, the division upholds a strong commitment to reliability, innovation, and environmental responsibility, supporting vehicle maintenance and repair throughout the region.
However, its sales planning process had long relied on Excel-based workflows, leading to several operational issues:
- Data corruption from concurrent access
- Manual input errors leading to inconsistent results
- Limited transparency across planning activities
Without integrated Demand Planning and Scenario Modelling, strategic flexibility and responsiveness to market changes were severely restricted.
Reconciling detailed data with higher-level inputs was complex and error-prone, while the lack of a centralized workflow management system hindered oversight and adaptability. Data integration with Demand Planning was difficult, complicating quantity incorporation and GAP analysis. The absence of scenario simulations limited strategic planning. Finally, inaccuracies in unconstrained Sales Planning have caused back-order (BO) situations, underscoring the need for a unified planning environment with more automation.
DENSO identified that enhancing integration, data accuracy, and scenario planning was essential to improve the division’s operational efficiency and competitive edge.
Celine D’Annucci
Before, everything was Excel-based. We were not able to have the levels of details that we can have with Board, meaning planning on item level.
The Solution: Integrated and Continuous Planning and Future-Ready Insights
DENSO selected Board for its unified approach to planning, analysis, and reporting, all within a single, integrated platform. It enables continuous planning across Sales, Supply Chain, and Finance, ensuring plans evolve in real time as new data—such as Logility’s volume forecasts or updated cost assumptions—becomes available.
Crucially, the output of the Sales Planning process now flows directly into the P&L Budget, which also runs in Board. This creates an end-to-end planning ecosystem that seamlessly connects operational forecasting to financial outcomes.
Looking ahead, Board’s technology roadmap, including AI integration through the Microsoft Azure stack, ensures that the platform will continue to evolve alongside DENSO’s needs. This forward-looking approach gave DENSO confidence that Board will support its strategic planning, reporting, and analytical requirements for the next five years and beyond.
Key Solution Areas
Area 1 – Integrated and Dynamic Planning Framework
With Board, DENSO integrates master data from multiple systems, ensuring accuracy, agility, and integration across Sales, Supply Chain, and Finance. It enables users to create and manage multiple planning scenarios and versions dynamically, each with configurable time horizons, while allowing new product and customer codes to be added directly within the platform to adapt to evolving business needs.
The planning process covers both product (SKU-level) and customer perspectives, supporting in-depth, multidimensional analysis. By combining top-down strategic alignment with bottom-up operational detail, organizations achieve plans that are both ambitious and executable.
Board also merges Sales Planning with Supply Chain inputs. Comprehensive Year-to-Go planning is supported through the integration of Logility’s volume forecasts with dynamic pricing and cost assumptions—allowing precise sales value and COGS projections. The platform also facilitates long-term strategic planning over a 5-year horizon, where users can model market growth, product launches and product discontinuations, as well as pricing and cost trends. This continuous planning loop aligns strategic objectives with market dynamics and operational realities, empowering teams to adapt quickly and maintain business agility.
This led to a strengthened cross-department integration, including the formal incorporation of Logility volume forecasts within Supply Chain and the direct use of Sales Planning outputs as the starting point for the P&L Budget in Finance.
Elena Kutlemina
Previously, we planned sales by customer and product group. With Board, we were able to go several levels deeper—planning down to the part-number level. We could also factor in prices, gross margins, and other key metrics. It was a major step forward for us.
Area 2 – Multidimensional Product and Customer-Level Planning
Planning is carried out at the product group level, with full drill-down capabilities across multiple dimensions, right down to individual SKUs and customer accounts. Users can review and adjust planned volumes while managing related pricing and cost data to ensure precise sales and COGS calculations. This multidimensional approach enhances accuracy and enables tighter alignment with both Supply Chain constraints and Financial requirements.
Area 3 – Workflow Monitoring and Insight Visualization
The solution enhances workflow oversight by clearly showing which planning steps have been completed, by whom, and at what time. It ensures full transparency, accountability, and progress tracking throughout the process. In addition, the solution incorporates visual dashboards that illustrate planning outcomes, allowing users to quickly interpret results and derive actionable insights.
Celine D’Annucci
The greatest benefit is that we can now work with scenarios. We can simulate different growth patterns and variables directly in Board and instantly see the impact. We can even compare versions. Today, all our planning is streamlined in one place—before, everyone did their own separate planning. Now, everything happens in Board.
The Benefits: Faster, smarter, and more connected planning
With Board, DENSO has turned static, spreadsheet-driven planning into a continuous, insight-led process spanning Sales, Supply Chain, and Finance. Plans are now living processes—updated dynamically as new information becomes available—allowing faster reactions to demand shifts, pricing changes, or market disruptions. The unified platform enables teams to spend more time analyzing data and making informed decisions, rather than verifying or processing it manually.
Forecast accuracy has improved significantly, supported by real-time data integration and scenario simulation. Collaboration between sales, demand, and finance teams has become seamless, as all stakeholders now plan, analyze, and adjust in one connected environment.
Key Benefits:
- Continuous planning across sales, demand, and finance in one platform
- Unified data enabling rolling forecasts and real-time updates
- Scenario simulations supporting proactive decision-making
- Increased forecast accuracy and agility in volatile markets
- Transparent workflows driving collaboration across 48 markets
- Extension into cost, price, and expense planning for holistic performance management
Key Benefits for Sales:
- Real-time SKU-level visibility
- Driver-based planning and scenario simulations
- Faster, more accurate forecasting
Key Benefits for Supply Chain:
- Direct integration of Logility’s volume forecasts
- Improved alignment between demand assumptions and sales planning
- Reduction in BO situations through more accurate volume incorporation
Key Benefits for Finance:
- Sales Planning output automatically feeds the P&L Budget in Board
- Strengthened link between operational planning and financial outcomes
- More reliable starting point for budgeting and profitability analysis
Overall, collaboration across sales, supply chain, and finance has become seamless. Plans are now updated continuously, ensuring DENSO responds faster to market changes while maintaining cross-functional alignment. This shift has reduced planning friction, improved responsiveness to demand shifts, and strengthened alignment between operational and financial planning across the business.
Ruslan Leontiev
I see Board as not just another system in our infrastructure, but as a comprehensive environment where we can manage different processes to gain maximum efficiency and synergy. After implementing the sales planning solution, we realized we could also use the system for other processes related to cost, price, and expense planning.
The Future
Elena Kutlemina
We have big plans for Board in the future. We are looking forward to implementing AI and machine learning in our financial planning. I believe that in the future, it will be increasingly important to anticipate change, stay agile, and adapt quickly to it.
About the Partner: K.Group
K.Group played a pivotal role in the success of DENSO’s Board implementation, guiding the organisation through a transformation that extended far beyond technology. Acting as both implementation partner and strategic advisor, K.Group supported DENSO in shifting from a fragmented, Excel-driven process to a unified and collaborative planning model that now seamlessly connects Sales, Finance, and Supply Chain. Their expertise, structured approach, and close cooperation with DENSO were essential in ensuring strong adoption, robust process alignment, and a truly integrated planning environment.
Andrea Patiti
The most meaningful change was cultural. By bringing together the product perspective of Product Management and the customer perspective of the Sales team, Denso has redefined how their people think, collaborate, and make decisions. Today, planning has become the natural bridge between strategy and execution.
Ruslan Leontiev
The implementation process went very smoothly thanks to K.Group. They are a highly customer-oriented company that brings strong expertise and process knowledge, supporting the organization in implementing or adjusting processes in the most efficient way.
