Carlsberg Group and Advanced Launch Direct Cost Planning Solution

2022: Launch of Raw Materials and Packaging Cost Forecasting and Analysis Solution

Carlsberg, together consulting with the company Advanced launched a solution for forecasting and analyzing the costs of raw materials and packaging materials based on the cloudy platform for integrated planning. Anaplan This was announced by Advanced on February 8, 2022. The main goal of the project is to build a single integrated process for quarterly and annual planning of costs for purchased materials. With Anaplan, you reduce planning time, increase granularity, data improve quality and speed of management decisions.

The digital transformation of business and the integration of functions is an important area of ​ ​ development, which has become even more relevant in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and constantly changing market prerequisites. One of the most important initiatives that helps the company effectively plan in the New Normal environment was a project to automate the material cost planning process.

The project was aimed at creating a regional automated tool for calculating material costs, creating a single data warehouse for five countries and automated factor analysis. Models for calculating forecast purchase prices for key categories have also been set up and a number of support reports have been automated. The project reduced the duration of the process and minimized the likelihood of errors. As of February 2022, the management of regional finances recognized the project as successful, directions for the further development of the model are actively discussed, "said Anatoly Muzalev, head of the controlling group in the Procurement direction of the Central and Eastern Europe region of the Baltika brewing company (part of the Carlsberg Group).

During the project, a castomized solution was created taking into account the peculiarities of the Carlsberg business. The price forecast functionality for key categories of products has been implemented, the prerequisites management and direct cost calculation module has been set up, and the financial closing process of the month has been automated. This made it possible to significantly increase the accuracy and reliability of forecasts, reduce the time to create them, make the process transparent to all participants, visualize key drivers of changes in material cost and identify additional opportunities for optimization.

The platform flexibility and agile approach to the project management provided by the lack of programming made it possible to implement it in 5 months. In March 2021, the first installation meeting was held, and already in August the Carlsberg team switched to planning material costs at Anaplan. In September 2021, the annual budget was automatically formed for the first time. Traditional solutions allow you to implement such tasks in a period of up to 12 months or more.

According to Anastasia Pyleva, head of the Anaplan implementation project in the Advanced team, the successful implementation of the project is largely due to the approach of creating a solution together with a team of customer business experts involved in the project from the very beginning, which made it possible to formulate current requirements for functionality, create a user-friendly interface and simplify the transition to a new tool.

Thanks to the capabilities of the Anaplan platform to store data for calculations in maximum detail, based on them, the system implements a unit for automatic calculation of detailed factor analysis for all targets. Factor analysis data is used to make management decisions and prepare various reports, including Ad-Hoc, both on personal information panels directly in the Anaplan workspace, called dashboards, and in the form of downloads in various formats: Excel, PDF, CSV, TXT.

The project, which we implemented together with Advanced, is not accidentally called "Compass." Baltika has a large range, 8 production sites in Russia, and the cost of raw materials and packaging materials is an important aspect of our business. The level of uncertainty caused by external economic factors is great in this area, and in order to make effective decisions on managing the company's profitability, we needed both a flexible and reliable tool for forecasting and analyzing the costs of raw materials and packaging. At the same time, we are interested in using a common model for five countries of the Eastern Europe cluster (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan), which greatly simplifies the work of regional teams responsible for finance and procurement. Given our previous positive experience with the development of the consolidated P&L model at Anaplan, we were confident that the second project in partnership with Advanced would also be implemented successfully. As a result, the project team worked perfectly, we received a new model on time, and I am sure that on the basis of this model we will be able to continue to optimize the financial support processes in our countries of presence, "said Elizaveta Palitsyna, director of controlling the operational function of the Eastern Europe region of the Baltika brewing company (part of Carlsberg Group).