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Edward Ervin, FP&A Solutions Analyst, shares how Global Switch is using Board to simplify planning, improve reporting, and build a stronger foundation for CAPEX, cashflow, and scenario modeling.
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Why This Story Matters
- Capital-intensive businesses require high-confidence, data-driven decisions
- Spreadsheet-based processes limit scalability, accuracy, and speed
- Scenario modeling is critical for investment and funding decisions
- Continuous planning enables plans and forecasts to adjust in real time
The Company
Global Switch is a leading data centre designer, builder, and operator with a presence across Europe and Asia-Pacific. In a fast-growing, capital-intensive market, the company manages large-scale infrastructure investments that require long-term planning alongside real-time financial control.
With Board, FP&A has become the glue that connects financial, operational, commercial, and investment planning, creating a single source of insight for decision-making.
Bruce Claassen
The Challenge: Managing complex investment planning with limited visibility
Global Switch needed to scale its FP&A capabilities to support rapid growth and increasing operational complexity across multiple markets, currencies, and regulatory environments.
However, planning was constrained by:
- Complicated, interlinked spreadsheets for revenue and financial planning
- Limited ability to support sales operations and CAPEX cycles effectively
- Inconsistent planning approaches across regions
- Lack of real-time visibility across financial and operational metrics
- Manual processes significantly slowed down analysis cycles, with critical financial insights often taking hours to compile and validate.
Edward Ervin
We were dealing with complex, interlinked spreadsheet models where broken links and manual effort made the process very time consuming.
At the same time, the business needed to modernize FP&A within a defined timeframe, requiring a solution that could scale with both complexity and growth.
The Solution: Building a continuous planning platform for real-time investment decisions
Global Switch evaluated planning solutions capable of supporting complex financial, operational, and investment planning requirements. Board was selected for its flexibility, real-time scenario modeling capabilities, and ability to provide a single platform for planning across revenue, profitability, CAPEX, and cashflow processes.
Bruce Claassen
We needed a platform that could support both long-term infrastructure investment planning and the day-to-day financial management of a rapidly growing global portfolio. Board stood out for its agility and flexibility, with the ability to run multiple scenarios in real time.
Global Switch has implemented Board as a unified planning platform, delivering:
- Standardized planning across markets and business units
- Full visibility of products and profitability down to EBITDA
- Rolling forecasts and long-term planning (3–10 years)
- Centralized data across financial, operational, and commercial metrics
- Real-time visibility and presentation-ready outputs
As part of its wider digital transformation, Global Switch is positioning FP&A as the central function that connects financial, operational, commercial, and investment data. Board provides a unified environment where these insights can be consolidated, analyzed, and shared across the business, enabling more aligned plans and data-driven decisions.
Expanding into CAPEX, cashflow, and operational modeling
Building on this foundation, Global Switch is expanding Board into CAPEX and cashflow planning to better manage large-scale investment programs.
This includes:
- Forecasting and tracking project portfolios and capital investments
- Supporting both high-level and detailed project modeling
- Improving visibility into cashflow and funding requirements
- Enabling advanced What-if scenario modeling
This next phase also includes developing a broader enterprise value model, supporting more comprehensive investment and performance analysis.
The Benefits: From manual effort to confident, data-driven decisions
- Full profitability visibility → insight down to EBITDA level
- Replaced complex spreadsheets → reduced risk and manual effort
- Reduced analysis time by up to 80–90% → key financial processes shortened from hours to minutes
- Improved real-time visibility → aligned financial and operational insights
- Enhanced scenario modeling → better investment decision-making
- Increased capacity for FP&A → more focus on business partnering
The ability to sit with decision makers and use Board to answer questions in real time has been one of the biggest drivers of adoption.
Bruce Claassen
Conclusion & Outlook
Global Switch is transforming FP&A into a strategic driver of growth in a capital-intensive, fast-moving industry.
By replacing fragmented processes with a unified planning platform, the company has gained real-time visibility into performance and improved its ability to support critical investment decisions.
This shift has significantly reduced the time required for financial analysis, enabling teams to focus on higher-value activities and more strategic decision-making.
As the scope expands into CAPEX, cashflow, and enterprise value modeling, Board is becoming the central platform to connect finance and operations—enabling Global Switch to manage complexity and growth, and make more confident decisions at scale.
