Transforming end-to-end budgeting, planning, and forecasting

00:00:09I'm based in Germany, now a headquarters. My main responsibility is the program portfolio and I'm simply responsible for the budget, the timing, and the privatization.

00:00:17As you can see it is a global company that I want to show to you, including the complexity of being a global company, a complexity of being in 27 different countries that, due to our history, they were all doing things their own way. They were dealing with their own business model and with their own processes.

00:00:40I would like to focus today mainly about integrated planning, where Board is definitely a big support. For us, it is not a project. It is a program, it is a transformation.

00:00:52We are rebuilding the company and the process. We need to increase the visibility, we need to know what has to happen along the process, what is the result, and who is actually working on that thing and making good decisions. We need to have that kind of integration. A step is an input for the next one and it is an output for the next one.

00:01:14What we started was a completely integrated planning process. Strategic planning is the starting point of everything. When, as a company, we sit together we define the strategic direction. So it is a planning of net sales for the next three years. High-level on division, region, how we want to make our money in the next three years.

00:01:36The next step is what defined the real starting point of seasonal planning. The means of how we, from an idea, enter into which product will help us to realize that idea.

00:01:49So, the merchandising plan is the responsibility of our global merchandising team and they simply take the number out of the strategic plan for the relevant year. They take those numbers and focus on a specific season because, you know, in our industry - the sportswear fashion - we work with season and we define the targets for that season in terms of gross sales, net sales, number of articles, number of styles that we are going to propose to the market, efficiency level, and many others.

00:02:22The output is the task for our business unit. Our business units are, let's say, the driving machine to create products. And they sit together with merchandising and they are trying to understand the target and detail down those targets in our categories. So our line level of products. What is coming next is the execution. The end result of the CAP phase.

00:02:52OK, I created my basket. What is coming next is the line plan. So, in Board I will probably only have the result of that one to have a comparison between the target, set up in the CAP, and the execution of each single product that needs to enter to fulfil the basket. The range plan is our, I would say, biggest, project we have done in Board. This is massive.

00:03:16The range plan is a tool that is used locally but we have dimensions that start from global, region, and area. So different levels of processes and different tasks that I've done in the tool.

00:03:34And there the main task is the classic of merchandising in an area. I select the product I want in my range. I defined my price point. I define my recommended retail price. I define my volume estimation and I also have an initial idea of the margin calculations out of this exercise.

00:03:56Out of this box we have something that is our normal forecasting, for this season. This is a big step. Here I'm talking about a solution that is present in every single country around the globe and I think we have more than 600 users accessing the tool. It is a really holistic approach to integrated planning.