Hamilton Bright, the leading full-service field marketing agency in the Benelux, transformed its complex, spreadsheet-driven planning into a driver-based, integrated process with Board The Enterprise Planning Platform. Board enabled faster budgeting, financial consolidation, and real-time reporting, replacing manual work with automation. This shift to a single point of truth improved data integrity, decision-making, and collaboration, delivering richer insights and substantial efficiency gains across the organization.
Why this story matters
Hamilton Bright’s journey shows the power of combining automation, ownership, and insight. By transforming its spreadsheet-based planning into an integrated, driver-based process with Board, the company turned complexity into clarity and gained measurable results across the organization.
Key outcomes:
- 60% of FP&A processes automated
- +70% more time for analysis and strategic work
- 30% fewer errors through improved data integrity
- Faster consolidation — from hours to minutes
- Greater transparency and collaboration across all business units
This story highlights how a modern planning platform empowers teams to work smarter, make confident decisions, and sustain performance.
The Company
As the only full-service field marketing agency in the Benelux, Hamilton Bright provides solutions for every stage of the customer journey. From store setup, POS material placement, and store staffing to account management and brand activation. Hamilton Bright works for hundreds of premium brands and retailers in a variety of disciplines and in various sectors. The company consists of many business units, which all focus on the client and the staff.
The Challenge: Making complexity more manageable
Previously, the planning process involved numerous spreadsheets which required time-consuming top-down/bottom-up back and forth. The finance team then decided this was the last time to run the budget rounds like that and started looking for a future-proof decision making platform.
The Solution: A flexible platform delivering deeper insights and faster decisions
Board was chosen based on its flexible, scalable and integrated approach, which will provide Hamilton Bright with a solution that can adapt to changing business requirements with ease. During a proof of concept, the Board team was able to build the solution on the fly with Hamilton Bright’s data in just 2 days, showing the full P&L in multiple dimensions.
We chose Board over other solutions for its flexibility. Today, we have richer data with more levels and greater granularity than we could achieve in other systems. This provides us with more business insights and enables better decision-making.
Jeroen Ekelenkamp
“It is also easier for us to roll up from a more detailed level in Board, while retaining all the insights for our business. This allows us to report to shareholders at a higher, more abstract level, as they prefer,” says Jeroen.
Board helps Hamilton Bright to increase the efficiency of planning processes by automating the collection and processing of the data & reports. Board also helps save time for multiple teams within the group, enable users to make better decisions thanks to greater integrity of data, and drive collaboration thanks to inbuilt communication capabilities.
Furthermore, Financial Consolidation and advanced reporting drives margin improvements and cost reductions through driver-based integrated business planning. Each budget holder now creates their own bottom-up plan, providing seamless insight into actuals versus targets and enabling greater performance, transparency, and efficiency across the organization.
Key Solution Areas
Area 1 – Financial Consolidation
Consolidation is based on intercompany relations (debtors/creditors) flagged in their data warehouse for P&L, and intercompany GL accounts for the balance sheet. Currency conversion and different consolidation nodes are included. The basis of elimination is achieved with a click of a button, and manual adjustments are possible after consolidation. When accounting is done correctly, consolidation takes only a few minutes instead of several hours of Excel work.
Area 2 – Planning Budgeting, and Forecasting
Board is also used for processes such as planning, budgeting, and forecasting, where a tailor-made model has been created to fit their business: the delivery of field workforce as a service. Approximately 35 budget holders plan for over 1,000 workforce heads, variable expenses, and revenue, all of which are allocated to customers and business units. The budget is driver-based: master data is loaded from the data warehouse at the employee level (e.g., salary, benefits, cars, IT tools, etc.). Budget holders plan changes in salaries, benefits, and variable costs, then allocate these costs to customers. In this way, they are confident in the accuracy and completeness of costs—crucial for preventing under-forecasting—and they maintain a full P&L at both the customer and business unit levels. The time spent by budget holders is approximately 4 hours per forecast version.
Area 3 – Management Reporting
Management reports are fully integrated and instantly available to all project managers (aprrox. 60 users). We provide live project and management reporting, refreshed hourly, and work closely with project managers during month-end close. This has significantly reduced the gap in closing and reporting times: we can now close on business working day 3 – 12.00AM with highly accurate numbers. There is no longer a need to send out figures, as everything is available in Board for project managers.
Before Board, we ran actuals on a BI system; now, we have a single source of truth for reports and business information, instantly accessible to all stakeholders—making the manual distribution of reports a thing of the past.
Jeroen Ekelenkamp
PlanPulse, who supported the implementation of Board, proved a reliable, knowledgeable partner, combining strong process and Board expertise with clear communication and on-time, in-scope delivery — building a true long-term partnership.
However, over the time, Hamilton Bright has also developed a high level of self-sufficiency in using and updating Board. The company has been able to independently develop new features like self-service reporting and analytics, which reduces dependence on external consultants and ensures in-house knowledge retention.
The Benefits: From manual work to a driver-based, digitally integrated process
The key improvements are: digitalization and better information. Many steps in the processes were automated, replacing previously manual work. In addition, numerous Excel files were replaced with Board.
Thanks to data drivers, it is now more difficult to under-forecast, and the correctness and completeness of the numbers have improved.
Jeroen Ekelenkamp
“In fact, we moved from using Excel—where we collected over 50 spreadsheets from budget holders and manually consolidated them—to a driver-based budgeting approach.
Thanks to data drivers, it is now more difficult to under-forecast, and the correctness and completeness of the numbers have improved. For example, in our case, we know that every individual employee, including associated costs such as cars and IT, is planned and reviewed by the budget holders. By reducing manual work, incorporating more driver-based data into the system, and adding more checks, the data quality has significantly improved, leading to better insights and more informed decisions,” explains Jeroen.
Long-term partnership with PlanPulse
Hamilton Bright and PlanPulse have established a long-term partnership built on collaboration and knowledge transfer. While PlanPulse initially supported the implementation, Hamilton Bright has since taken ownership of ongoing developments, including self-service reporting and analytics, empowering teams to innovate independently and retain expertise in-house. The long-term partnership involved one or two joint projects to provide a head start combined with knowledge transfer. After that, Hamilton Bright and PlanPulse stay in contact to discuss further developments and determine PlanPulse’s involvement in design and/or development as needed.
Hamilton Bright highly values PlanPulse’s deep understanding of both business processes and technology. Their expertise with the Board platform, proactive mindset, and passion for delivering results were evident throughout the project. PlanPulse played a key role in deconstructing and rebuilding Hamilton Bright’s budgeting process into a data-driven model and consistently delivered on time, within scope, and on budget. Clear communication and mutual transparency around scope management ensured smooth collaboration, enabling both teams to meet tight deadlines confidently and deliver exceptional results.
“I have worked with them with two tight deadlines/short time frames, both times delivered on the deadline. Communication is good, quick in the return and great availability when there are questions or issues. We feel we have a partnership relation with PlanPulse for the long term and not a traditional supplier – buyer relationship.”
— Jeroen Ekelenkamp, Group Controller at Hamilton Bright
