Bosch in Russia (Robert Bosch) (Microsoft SharePoint)

2013: Power BI Platform Flexible Budgeting for Bosch

This solution is designed to implement top-down and bottom-up rolling budgeting processes, model planned indicators, compare with historical facts and forecasts, and analyze data at all consolidation levels. One of the main advantages for customers is the reduction of employee time for budgeting.

Corporate business planning standards require a large amount of computation across hundreds of cost elements and financial responsibility centers, taking into account the mass of natural indicators. Before the implementation of the solution, the entire implementation of planning by Robert Bosch LLC was carried out in Excel, which, with a large number of cost centers and profits, items and indicators, significantly increased human labor costs, especially taking into account the rolling planning process, when all budgets should be recalculated on a regular basis, while maintaining versionality.

One of the possible solutions to this problem was to increase the number of employees responsible for planning, as well as creating intermediate Excel files. However, these measures only led to an increase in labor costs.

Since an effective and one-time solution to these problems was required, Robert Bosch management opted for a Microsoft BI-based module:

• 1. Revenue budgeting, including revenue calculation based on key targets;
• 2. Budgeting of fixed costs, with the possibility of calculations taking into account natural indicators;
• 3. Budgeting of variable costs, taking into account budgeting of planned turnover;
• 4. Distribution of total costs between the Central Federal District, including the creation of hierarchical allocation keys and allocations;
• 5. Investment planning and calculation of planned depreciation;
• 6. Personnel planning by financial responsibility centers taking into account analytical characteristics;
• 7. Calculation of planned markdown and provisions for warehouse, receivables.

The budgeting results are available through a multidimensional analytical cube, which defines the hierarchies of financial responsibility centers, revenue and expense items, and allows you to see the calculation results at different levels of the organizational hierarchy (for example, turnover calculation).

For the user, the cube is a summary Excel table that generates all reports for any aggregation group and various sections.

The main result of the implementation is a reduction in the time to perform routine planning procedures and the ability to more efficiently perform business analysis procedures.