Ajinomoto Indonesia focuses on global corporate goals

All Ajinomoto companies around the world share two overarching corporate goals: increasing the healthy life expectancy of a billion people worldwide, and reducing the company’s environmental impact. Ambitious goals like these call for financial discipline, so Ajinomoto Indonesia provides monthly financial reporting. The manual process in place in Indonesia was built around multiple complex spreadsheets.

“Using our old systems, monthly reporting would be impossible,” recalls Mohamad Lili, Deputy Department Manager of Information Technology at Ajinomoto Indonesia, manufacturer of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) like seasoning mixes and other food ingredients. The company’s finance team sought out new technology to meet the challenge and chose Anaplan.

Data and users throughout the business

The team at Ajinomoto Indonesia built a financial budgeting and forecasting solution in Anaplan to meet the new corporate mandate. The solution leveraged the platform’s ability to quickly create and test multiple scenarios.

To maximize the solution’s capabilities, the Ajinomoto Indonesia tapped into a variety of data sources including SAP ERP, a CRM system, and specialized data such as marketing plans, distribution ratios, lead-time delivery data, and product bills of materials (BOMs). The platform was put into the hands of users from across the company in departments including finance, production planning, logistics and distribution, marketing, sales, and management.

Manual processing eliminated

The solution promptly achieved its initial goal, increasing the frequency of financial reporting and enabling real-time adjustments. The spreadsheets used annually in the old system were completely eliminated.

Other related benefits quickly became apparent. “Our finance people are able to do seamless planning in one single platform,” Lili reports. “All the information they need is in Anaplan. They don’t need to spend time compiling spreadsheets manually any longer.” Lili also reports that financial accuracy has improved because the planning cycle requires less human manipulation of critical data. Qualitative benefits include better collaboration between teams, a single source of truth (eliminating the need to inform others of every change in a spreadsheet), improved data accuracy, less overhead required to store monthly versions of spreadsheets, and consolidated data in Anaplan for easier and quicker planning.

Focusing on goals

Based on the success of its Anaplan-powered financial solution, Ajinomoto Indonesia created a Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solution a few years after the finance solution launched. The S&OP solution includes material purchase planning, distribution planning, delivery scheduling, inventory optimization, and distribution scheduling. As in the finance solution, all needed data is accessible to planners directly in Anaplan. While measurable KPI improvements have not yet been calculated, Lili and his colleagues are confident that the solution supports gains across the company’s supply chain.

Lili adds that the platform approach enabled by Anaplan has boosted productivity in teams throughout Ajinomoto Indonesia, and helped them focus on Ajinomoto’s ambitious global corporate goals.

“All the stakeholders — particularly those in finance — are more focused on strategic planning than they were before we had Anaplan,” Lili concludes. “They used to spend time compiling and correcting data. Now, they can concentrate on strategy and overall organizational goals.”