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Categories: Thought Leadership3 min read

Automating decentralized planning in manufacturing

Mid-market and enterprise manufacturers often operate multiple plants in more than one country. A planning and budgeting process that is supported only by Excel results in hundreds, if not thousands, of spreadsheets being sent back and forth. This results in lower accuracy, takes up valuable time, and is generally frustrating for every finance professional that must validate and consolidate the data. In this blog post, we look at how global manufacturing firm Bystronic optimized their internal business processes.

It is not uncommon to see robots roaming the floors in production plants of organizations in manufacturing and ERP systems widely used. In contrast, financial planning processes in manufacturing often still heavily rely on spreadsheets or other isolated solutions that were not designed to support collaboration. Lengthy planning cycles are the result and often lead to outdated, inaccurate plans. Even the slightest changes can cause problems and make this process impractical for long term success.

To increase resilience and be better prepared, scenario modeling and continuous forecasting are key to success. This is why competitive organizations like Bystronic use specialized solutions that help them automate, streamline, and transform processes around their planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

Successful global operations require reliable planning solutions

With over 2,800 employees worldwide, Bystronic is a leading supplier of solutions for sheet metal processing. The Swiss company is part of the industrial holding Conzzeta and is represented in over 30 countries. Decentralized budget planning for various development and production sites used to be done with Excel.

Stefan Rusu, Senior Group Controller, is enthusiastic about their new solution, and says:

“With the introduction of the planning application, we made a big leap forward. Jedox is very user friendly. In doing so, we can design our own individual planning model and place operational planning in the hands of the world-wide distributed specialist users.”

Deployment within a few months

Together with Jedox partner Business & Decision (B&D), Bystronic’s group controllers implemented their customized model. The B&D Simple.Planner-Suite® uses Jedox’ integration with Qlik which allows an intuitive analysis and visualization of the planning implemented with the solution. The ready-made structures of the model from the Jedox Marketplace accelerated the process. In just six months, Bystronic and B&D were able to complete the implementation and improve their budgeting processes in over 30 countries.

Advanced self-service for planning, reporting, and analysis

With integrated EPM, planning, reporting, and analysis are possible all within one unified solution. With the outstanding scores Jedox achieved for ease of use1, resources from other departments such as IT are able to be reserved.

The intuitive user interface makes planning processes easy for business users – without the need to know coding. With the ease of use, flexibility of the platform, Qlik integration, and easily adaptable solution, Bystronic optimized their budgeting, planning, and forecasting with seamless automation.

The ability to create quick ad hoc analyses with a high level of detail helps the company to always have a holistic overview of the current business drivers. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the industry division such as Capex, Opex, and warranty costs are effortlessly integrated and able to be included in their modern, collaborative planning and budgeting processes.

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1 BARC The Planning Survey 20

Jedox

Jedox is the world’s most adaptable planning and performance management platform that empowers organizations to deliver plans that outperform expectations. Over 2,800 organizations in 140 countries trust Jedox to model any scenario, integrate data from any source and simplify cross-organizational plans across all business systems. Jedox enables a culture of decisiveness and confidence so teams can plan for opportunities, react quickly to changes, and uncover what they didn’t know was possible.

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