CHALLENGE:
Limited forecast agility and scenario analysis
The organization has one of the largest and most geographically distributed footprints in the world. However, their global financial planning process relied heavily on spreadsheets supported by a legacy consolidation tool.
Finance teams across regions spent significant time manually building and maintaining thousands of interconnected spreadsheets. Planning inputs, outputs, and assumptions were shared through constant hand-offs of files between teams, creating version control issues, security risks, and frequent questions about data accuracy and ownership. Critical calculations were embedded in individual spreadsheets, often undocumented, and heavily dependent on institutional knowledge.
The volume and complexity of the planning effort made it difficult for finance partners to run multiple forecast versions or meaningful what‑if scenarios consistently across teams and geographies. In addition, workforce planning was complicated. Corporate functions planned at the individual employee level for tens of thousands of roles, which amounted to higher levels of detail but did not translate into better forecast accuracy. This significantly increased cycle times and limited the organization’s ability to shift from a quarterly forecasting rhythm to a more responsive monthly cadence.
Ultimately, the organization faced a growing gap between the speed and agility required by the business and the capabilities of its planning processes. Leadership needed a centralized, governed, and scalable planning platform, one that could support global collaboration, enable scenario planning, simplify workforce forecasting, and free finance teams to focus on insight rather than mechanics.
SOLUTION:
A long-term transformation
To deliver a truly global financial planning solution, we set up a five-year transformation journey with careful considerations around the scale of the program, the number of geographies involved, and the time required to drive lasting change.
To establish long term trust, we built strong governance as the foundation for success. This ensured that as the program scaled, all teams stayed aligned to shared principles around design, usability, and data integrity.
Plan of action: Scaling with control
The program began with a focused, model-by-model approach. Initial efforts centered on corporate cost center planning, including G&A functions, to stabilize core planning processes within corporate offices. This allowed teams to gain confidence in the platform before expanding into more complex areas of the business.
As the program moved into retail planning, the approach shifted. We launched multiple workstreams in parallel, at times three to six simultaneously, to support the scale of the retail business. To avoid fragmentation, we introduced an enterprise architecture framework supported by standards for model design, user experience, naming conventions, and workspace structure. This ensured a consistent look and feel for planners working across multiple models.
Built: A unified, driver-based planning ecosystem
The solution expanded to cover the organization’s full global planning footprint. Corporate planning was unified across regions, followed by a major transformation of the retail business. We created models for revenue, cost of goods sold, labor, operating expenses, and capital expenditures, with a strong emphasis on driver-based planning and statistical forecasting.
Additional models were developed for licensed and franchise operations, as well as channel development, including grocery and consumer product lines. Together, these models supported a consolidated end‑to‑end P&L forecast within a single planning platform, bringing multiple business units together into one connected view.
This foundation enabled a major shift in how forecasting was done. Forecast cycle times were significantly reduced, allowing the organization to move from quarterly to monthly forecasting. Scenario planning capabilities were embedded across models, enabling users to test changes, such as wage increases, and immediately see the impact across the P&L without rebuilding forecasts.
Enhanced reporting was also a key outcome. Dedicated reporting models were created to analyze margin flow-through and understand how changes in revenue and key drivers affect costs and operating income. In addition, self-service reporting capabilities were enabled, allowing finance teams to build their own reports from a centralized data source.
RESULTS:
Faster, smarter, and more scalable planning
The organization achieved real-time connectivity between planning inputs and reporting outputs across teams and geographies. Manual hand-offs were eliminated as data flowed directly from source systems through automated integrations, significantly improving reliability, transparency, and trust in the numbers. With a centralized planning platform in place, teams gained a single source of truth, reducing versioning issues and strengthening governance across the global finance function.
Forecast cycle times were materially reduced, enabling a shift from quarterly to monthly forecasting. Advanced what‑if and scenario planning capabilities allowed teams to link scenarios across business units and quickly assess the impact of changes without rebuilding models. By up-leveling, standardizing, and streamlining core planning processes, finance teams spent less time assembling forecasts and more time analyzing drivers, supporting decisions, and partnering with the business.
