COLLONIL saves three weeks of planning preparation every year

Salzenbrodt GmbH & Co KG produces products for the demanding leather and textile care sector. The company’s traditional COLLONIL brand is known worldwide. Customers include large shoe stores and their branches, which are supported by the Berlin-based company’s extensive distribution network. The planned sales volumes of the local sales staff are a decisive starting point for corporate management. Sales volume planning determines which items need to be produced, when, and to what extent. Of course, procurement and warehouse logistics also depend on this.

The entire sales and operations planning up to 2023 was prepared in Excel, with SAP as the data source. The effort required for the annual planning was enormous: the responsible finance and sales controller needed three weeks just to manually prepare and send the plan folders by email. Further effort was required to monitor the feedback and manually consolidate the data for the Excel plan at the item and customer levels. This was followed by the time-consuming upload of the planning data to SAP: extensive amounts of data were transferred back to SAP in more than 20 transactions and made available there for production planning and procurement.

In addition, there were other known disadvantages of planning with individual Excel sheets: susceptibility to errors, incompleteness, and lack of timeliness. Due to the high effort involved, planning could only be carried out once a year. During the planning process, which lasted several weeks, the data was already outdated due to dynamic market developments.

Reducing financial risks

Inaccurate sales planning harbored growing risks such as the threat of overproduction. If the sales generated do not follow, the planning, sales, and inventories, accordingly, revenue and working capital diverge.

The finance team therefore wanted to replace Excel planning with a powerful, agile planning system. The aim was to generate valid planning figures with considerably less planning effort. A quarterly rolling forecast was also desired. On this basis, the finance team wanted to establish comprehensive sales controlling and planning, including plan/actual comparisons and variance analyses, which had not been possible before.

Jedox was the right software solution for this project. The project managers saw the flexibility of the powerful planning tool, the similarity to Excel, and the scalability, which will allow the reporting system to be continuously developed in the direction of contribution margin accounting, cost center accounting, and P&L in the future.

Jedox recommended its partner company Advanced Applications, a proven expert in SAP and Jedox, for the implementation. With the help of Advanced Applications, the implementation was completed within the tight timeframe envisioned: within three months, project manager Sandra Richter implemented the annual sales planning in Jedox together with a consultant. Following the start of the project in July 2023, sales volume planning for the following year could already be carried out in Jedox by that fall..

The basis for the rapid implementation was the BI Ready-to-Run models from Advanced Applications. The standardized models offer lean extract, transform, load (ETL) processes for each SAP module to extract the required SAP data and ready-made reports in Jedox. With the help of Ready-to-Run SD, the sales reports, which were gradually adapted and refined, were ready within a few days.

Efficient planning process

For the planning process, a new workflow with three-stage coordination processes was modeled in Jedox. Whereas, previously, three sales managers created the annual plan for all customers, the process now starts with the account managers, who plan sales at the item level. In the second stage, the sales managers with general responsibility for specific customer groups check the aggregated plan values, and, in the third stage, the commercial manager, the CEO, and Sandra Richter acted as the controllers responsible for planning.

At the start of bottom-up planning, account managers automatically receive emails with a link to planning screens in Jedox with the data for their respective customer base. The mask accesses the master data fields from the SAP customer master and shows the items purchased by the customer as actual default values. The planners are also supported by article lists from the SAP data master and diagrams that visualize plan effects. With currently 15 – and, in the future, 20 – participants, planning is now customer-oriented and much more realistic than before.

A control panel, automatically aggregated plan values, and a monitor that displays the status of the individual planning steps in a traffic light system ensure fast and error-free processing and replace the notepads on the desks of those responsible for planning. Advanced Applications has also automated the writing of planning data back to SAP.

Rolling forecast based on annual planning

The project managers have implemented the rolling forecast on the basis of the annual plan. Here, the budget figures are checked on a quarterly basis, adjusted, if necessary, and automatically fed back into SAP. From the project team’s point of view, the gradual implementation from annual planning to the rolling forecast was an effective approach. In preparation, the master data in the SAP pre-system was cleansed and enriched with classifications. Master data management and maintenance is located exclusively in SAP. For example, groupings of the customer master by account managers or article groups in the article master, which were previously maintained in Excel, are consistently stored in SAP as a clean basis for automated assignment in the Jedox data models.

The high degree of automation in Jedox makes the planning process considerably easier. Instead of three weeks of manual preparatory work, the planning round now starts at the touch of a button. The efficient process with more planning participants and an additional rolling forecast takes planning to a new level of timeliness and accuracy.

The close integration of SAP and Jedox with automated data streams in both directions is a significant advantage. Today, all Jedox users work with daily updated, real-time data on a shared database. Planning is done monthly with seasonalized default values. The planning data is then automatically imported from Jedox into production planning in SAP. Instead of fixed annual values distributed equally across all months, sales, production, and all other departments now receive realistic and up-to-date plan values for their management.

The finance team intends to use the time saved by reducing Excel work to further expand the Jedox solution. The next steps are sales volume planning, followed by sales planning and revenue planning that are tied to the P&L-planning. Management reporting based on stakeholder needs will be configured in parallel so the finance team is able to plan efficiently and share insights effectively.

“With sales planning in Jedox, we generate valid and market-oriented sales figures to manage production, procurement, warehousing, and other departments.”

– Sandra Richter, Finance & Sales Controller & Product Owner Jedox, COLLONIL / Salzenbrodt GmbH & Co. KG