Pixartprinting
Pixartprinting streamlines cross-departmental coordination of thousands of daily print jobs
Discover the benefits of the Intelligent Planning Platform for a Company working across physical factories and online e-commerce
As one of the major European players in online printing services, Pixartprinting sought an innovative solution to automate the company’s planning processes. Using the Board Intelligent Planning Platform, Pixartprinting combined its main planning cycles in a single hyper-responsive environment for financial budgeting and consolidation, sales budgeting and forecasting, and capacity planning, including the intelligent management of its print machining centers. Board has empowered the FP&A team with an IBP methodology, as well as simulation and scenario management capabilities, a reduction in non-value added workload, increased forecast accuracy and data quality, and the opportunity to deliver meaningful insights in a collaborative way across different departments.
- Industry: E-commerce
- Department: All
- Print jobs: 15,000 per day
- Employees: 1,200
- Founded: 1994
Based in the north-east of Italy, Pixartprinting is the European leader for customized online printing services including magazines, catalogues, labels, packaging, and textiles. Its online presence is made possible by 1,200 passionate and talented people who handle 15,000 print jobs a day. The company offers a complete, professional service that aims to support its customers’ communication projects.
The Challenge
Pixartprinting used to handle Strategic Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting processes in Excel, but they began to search for an innovative planning solution to tackle new competitive market challenges. In particular, the Company was experiencing a simultaneous change of the ERP system in some of its branches: it was the right moment to replace an FP&A spreadsheet-based approach with a more advanced solution.
“We were struggling with lack of collaboration across our departments due to a data-silos approach, as well as information redundancy. That turned out into difficulty in driving our planning, forecasting, and business modelling processes” – explained Federica Da Deppo, Head of FP&A.
Therefore, Pixartprinting was searching for a new tool able to provide the big picture of Company’s information, whilst ensuring fast responsing time when querying their databases. The new solution also had to make scenario simulation easier and more intuitive - to improve their decision-making processes – and to automatize relevant planning and analytics processes.
The Project
The key dimension of the Board Intelligent Platform’s implementation in Pixartprinting cover three main areas: closing management, financial planning with Integrated Business Planning (IBP) methodology, sales performance management (SPM). Using the same Board database architecture and planning platform, Pixartprinting has also built a capacity plan for the print machines, that – among other things – feeds the HR planning process. Given the extensive range covered by the Intelligent Planning Platform, Pixartprinting has in fact also build a S&OP process across the organization. Below the pillars of the project:
Closing management
- Local closures
- Monthly Consolidation (P&L)
- Reporting automation: P&L vs. Budgets and Previous Year; KPIs Analysis (orders, deliveries, profitability in terms of € per sqm, etc.)
Integrated Business Planning
- P&L Planning (Revenue/OpEx)
- Net Working Capital Planning
- CapEx Planning
- Profitability Analysis
- Extended Planning and Analysis to HR, Marketing, and IT Departments
- General & Administrative Expenses Planning
- Financial Forecasting, based on daily allocation of monthly orders, according to historical series
Sales Performance Management
- Automatic Monthly Sales Budgeting (by product family, product item, country), based on: (i) historical data; (ii) strategic plan
- Daily Sales Forecasting (by product family, product item, country)
- Sales Analytics
- Sales Profitability
Capacity Planning
- Automatic set by production line
- Print machine’s parameters management, such as: rated capacity, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (O.E.E.) indicators, Shifts, Non-Usage.
- Capacity overview by machining center (budget sqm vs. work center capacity)
- Full Time Equivalent (FTE) by machining center (this information also works as input for the HR plan)
The Benefits of Intelligent Planning
Using the Board Intelligent Planning Platform, Pixartprinting has streamlined their planning, forecasting and scenario management, giving shape to an end-to-end planning across the key departments of the Company. Among the several benefits they have praised, Pixartprinting has highlighted the following:
- Standardization of the planning environment, thanks to the Board unified architecture and database that gathers all the relevant information from different departments and different planning cycles.
- Higher speed of reaction, through reporting automation, able to generate actionable insights from information.
- Unified Financial and non-financial planning, using the same Intelligent Platform to create budgets and forecasts for Finance, Sales & Marketing, Production, HR.
- Reduction of non-value added activities by FP&A team and improved data analysis, thanks to the automation of several analytics and reporting processes, combined with what-if analysis.
“Our planning and forecasting processes have been channelled into stable, orderly structures, overcoming the uncertainties caused by Excel and enhancing cooperation between departments. Board has especially led to greater and better interaction between sales and production, guaranteeing the consistency, timeliness, and usability of the data: an essential support for decision-making” – concluded Federica Da Deppo
