"Tape" automatized the planning of personnel costs

2025: Automation of Personnel Cost Planning

Tape has automated personnel cost planning with IBM Planning Analytics. Lenta announced this on May 28, 2025.

Generated by the ChatGPT neural network

At the time of the start of the project in 2022, the company's management already understood that on the eve of such active growth, it was impossible to remain on manual planning of expenses for office personnel using Excel, because it did not provide the necessary accuracy, much less the efficiency of preparing budgets and forecasts.

For these reasons, it was decided to develop an automated budgeting, forecasting and plan-fact analysis of office personnel costs with the working name PEX Tool.

Based on the results of the tender, Biplanum was chosen as the partner of this project.

Planning in the system takes place with detailing to a specific employee: from numbers to contributions to social funds. The basis is the Staffing for the last month before the start of the budget process with the possibility of applying additional planning parameters for future changes.

PEX Tool implements units for budgeting the number, salary, re-working, bonuses, taxes, severance pay, travel expenses, as well as vacation reserves and bonuses. After filling in the Standard Arrangement, the data of which is imported from SAP HR, the models automatically perform calculations for each block based on the developed methodology. Then the values ​ ​ are transferred to the summary forms, namely the employee vault, the cost object vault and MDD.

If an HR business partner or manager within his/her business unit needs to make adjustments, it is possible to make appropriate point changes that are not lost, and on budget protection will help to justify the reasons for deviations from algorithmized calculations. For example, due to which the payroll plans increased in relation to the previous month.

In addition to planning for current employees, the model implements a mechanism for creating vacancies. It is enough to fill in the characteristics of the future employee on one form, click the create button - and the data will automatically appear in the summary budget forms.

The system allows you to simultaneously maintain several budget and forecast scenarios with a horizon from 1 to 12 months, conduct a comprehensive analysis of variances between scenarios, versions and periods.

In the forecast versions, the actual values ​ ​ for closed months are replaced: for example, in the 3 + 9 forecast, the system will fill out the first 3 months with a fact, and the remaining 9 will calculate according to the established algorithms. Actual data is automatically received by the PEX Tool using implemented integration mechanisms accounting systems SAP with HR SAP BW,,. SAP ERP

The actual plan analysis allows you to analyze data at different levels - by employee, position, cost center, and other categories. The analysis is available from month to year, including the Year to Date measure. Also, the plan-fact analysis provides for the comparison of planned vacancies with current employees.

The model has configured access for more than 100 users through SSO technology. Each user can view and enter data only for employees strictly within their area of responsibility, which ensures a high level of security of sensitive information.

The automated system allowed:

• Reduce labor costs for the budget campaign;
• Improve the accuracy of budgeting and forecasting;
• Reduce errors and increase process transparency;
• Reduce labor costs during the plan-actual analysis;
• Reduce management decision-making time;
• Implement budgeting and forecasting versionality.