TD SYNNEX transformed its complex, fragmented gross profit planning processes in Europe by implementing Board, The Enterprise Planning Platform. The platform supports planning across 47 legal entities, automates data consolidation and currency conversion, and enables real-time collaboration and transparency. Local teams benefit from pre-populated methods, flexible input options, and advanced scenario planning, while corporate FP&A gains faster insight and control. With minimal IT support, the solution scales easily and adapts to business needs—setting a new benchmark in financial planning efficiency.
Merche Boronat
It’s not just about better numbers—it’s about better processes, better collaboration, and better decisions. Board has been a real gamechanger for us.
Why This Story Matters
“It’s not just about better numbers—it’s about better processes, better collaboration, and better decisions.”
With this mindset, TD SYNNEX reshaped its financial planning landscape using Board. Their journey illustrates how a modern planning technology can radically improve financial operations—even at one of the world’s largest IT distributors. With Board, the finance team has moved from fragmented Excel files to a unified, transparent, and scalable planning ecosystem.
The Company
TD SYNNEX is a global IT distributor and Fortune 100 company operating in over 100 countries with more than 23,000 employees. The company connects over 2,500 technology vendors, resellers, system integrators, and service providers with 200,000 products/solutions and 150,000 customers across the globe. With a diverse portfolio ranging from endpoint devices to cloud security and data center solutions, TD SYNNEX plays a pivotal role in enabling digital transformation across industries.
The Challenge: Complex, Fragmented Planning
Managing 150,000 vendors in 100 countries with constantly changing business conditions is tremendously challenging for a global organization. As the industry itself is extremely fast paced, balancing the need for local flexibility with global oversight became increasingly difficult.
In addition, TD SYNNEX Europe continued to grow and expand its international footprint. With 47 local entities operating across different markets, each with its own specific requirements, the organization recognized the need for a new approach.
It was the lack of real-time visibility into planning processes, combined with data quality concerns, and labor-intensive updates, that prompted TD SYNNEX to seek a more scalable and robust solution for the European market. To support its modernization and drive greater agility, TD SYNNEX set out to harmonize planning across countries and business units, ensuring consistency and transparency throughout the organization.
Why TD SYNNEX Chose Board
After a comprehensive evaluation of several leading enterprise planning platforms, TD SYNNEX selected Board based on several critical advantages:
- The ability to connect directly to their consolidation system
- Granular security and approval workflows
- Support high-volume, complex planning data structures
- Ease of use and low IT reliance
“One of the main reasons we started using Board was its ability to handle security controls and real-time visibility, even before countries finalized their numbers,” explains Merche. “That was not possible with Excel. Furthermore, Board provided the best user experience and functionalities in a mature, modern solution that was flexible and code free which allows FP&A independent administration from IT.”
The Solution: A Unified Planning Platform, Decentralized Operations
Today, TD SYNNEX manages gross profit planning for 47 legal entities across Europe on one unified platform. The implementation includes planning by product families, vendors, and reporting lines—resulting in millions of planning points per cycle.
Planning is split into two major processes: annual planning and monthly forecasts (“outlooks”), both run on the same platform. The central FP&A team initiates the cycle by uploading historical data, exchange rates, and planning guidelines. These initial values are seeded for each entity, reducing the need for local teams to start from scratch.
Each local team logs in and finds a pre-populated plan version tailored to their scope. They can adjust, refine, and submit their versions for approval through a clearly defined workflow starting from the planner to the business unit manager and finally the FP&A Lead. Approved plans are automatically synchronized with TD SYNNEX’s global consolidation system.
A key capability of Board is its automatic currency conversion, which is especially critical for regional management. For instance, in the Nordic region, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden each operate with different local currencies. While planning is carried out locally in each currency, the regional FP&A team and finance director need a consolidated view for decision-making.
“The system marries the four Nordic countries into one region and automatically performs the currency translation,” explained Merche. “All of the numbers can be checked in euros immediately, without having to download the information, convert it, and reassemble it. This automatic consolidation is very important to us—it allows regional leaders to verify numbers instantly in the group currency, which is euros, with no extra steps.”
Board also enables top-down planning where central users can input high-level adjustments (e.g., add five million Euro of sales for a product family), which are then automatically dispersed to lower levels based on historical as well as actual data. Local teams particularly appreciate this flexibility, as it saves time and ensures consistency.
Merche Boronat
One of the main reasons we started using Board was its ability to handle security controls and real-time visibility, even before countries finalized their numbers.
Another feature praised by the company is that Board allows access to the data based on their role (e.g., planner, local FP&A, central FP&A). This role-based access ensures clarity, accountability, and data security across a complex planning organization.
Remarkably, TD SYNNEX manages the entire Board environment with just two non-developer finance professionals: “We can quickly respond to country requests, build reports or workflows, and keep the system aligned with business needs—all without relying on IT,” Merche noted.
Benefits: Scalable, Accurate, and Future-ready Planning
TD SYNNEX has modernized its financial planning by eliminating manual consolidation, enabling real-time visibility, and empowering teams to plan more strategically. The result is less effort, more transparency, and faster decisions leveraging a solution that connects FP&A from corporate to the local levels adapting to regional needs and global standards alike.
- Time savings: Local planners no longer build spreadsheets from scratch and are supported by automatic consolidation and approval flows, dramatically reducing back-and-forth on- and offline communication, and manual errors.
- Data confidence: Central FP&A teams now have real-time visibility into local planning progress, even before submissions are finalized. This transparency allows for early intervention and better alignment across teams.
- Flexibility: TD SYNNEX can now work at different planning levels, depending on the size and complexity of each entity. Planners can work top-down, bottom-up, or by vendor, product, or reporting line.
- Empowerment: Local teams can run scenario planning without needing to build new models. Whether it’s a base, best-case, or worst-case version, they can plan flexibly and in real-time.
- Scalability: With hundreds of thousands of planning data points per version, Board proves it can handle the complexity of a large multinational. From 300 vendors per entity to 75 product codes and 20+ reporting lines, the system keeps pace without performance issues.
- Simplicity in management: Despite the complexity, the entire system is maintained by just two finance users. “The tool is flexible and easy to learn. We can say yes to new requests from the countries without going back to IT” said Merche.“
Conclusion
TD SYNNEX replaced planning processes and the Board platform has become the standard for financial planning using Board. Their transformation demonstrates how technology and vision can come together to reshape financial planning at scale. By moving to an integrated planning platform, the finance team has gained not only efficiency, but also confidence and control.
Today, decisions are made faster, insights travel further, and collaboration flows seamlessly across countries. The journey with Board continues, as TD SYNNEX is considering to expand its use of the platform to new areas—turning unified planning into a true driver of strategic value.
