Brussels Airlines improves its financial planning process with the Anaplan platform

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A Belgian air carrier that transports 6.5 million passengers annually, Brussels Airlines was frustrated by lack of collaboration in its finance organization. By implementing its full finance operation on Anaplan—including budgeting, forecasting, and long-term planning—the team is now less reliant on IT and able to innovate quickly and efficiently.
Since Anaplan, we can’t imagine going back to the previous set-up we had.
Controlling and Business Intelligence Department Lead

6.5 million

annual passengers

  • SOLUTIONS

    Finance

  • INDUSTRIES

    Logistics & Transportation

Challenge

As the leading major airline offering flights to and from Brussels Airport, Brussels Airlines transports 6.5 million passengers to 80 locations annually. With a financial planning process that needs to accommodate over two billion data combinations, its mix of spreadsheets and legacy tools had put both its planning process and finance team at a disadvantage.

Solution

Feeling frustrated with the inability to collaborate efficiently, Vanessa Rentiers, Controlling and Business Intelligence Department Lead at Brussels Airlines, began searching for a better way of planning. After a demo of the Anaplan platform, Vanessa and her team knew immediately that the platform’s flexibility was going to positively change how they worked.

Results

Using the Anaplan platform, Brussels Airlines has been able to implement its full scope of financial planning including budgeting, forecasting, and long-term planning. The finance team quickly mastered the tool, and are equipped to support, execute, and implement the simulations, forecasts, and budgets needed for company projects. The finance team now owns their own planning system without reliance on IT, which has improved efficiency and fast innovation.

Why Anaplan

Brussel Airlines selected the Anaplan platform because of its ease-of-use, as well as the ability to provide real-time insights and accommodate large amounts of data. Since implementing the platform, Vanessa shared that her team cannot imagine returning to life before Anaplan, and that she looks forward to all of the platform’s possibilities.

My name is Vanessa Rentiers, I lead the department of Controlling and Business Intelligence at Brussels Airlines.

Within our department, we deal with all planning processes, such as budgets, forecasts, and long-term planning.

Brussels Airlines is the leading major airline offering the widest choice of flights from and to Brussels Airport. We transport 6.5 million passengers a year. We have about 80 destinations.

When it comes to planning data, we have about two billion data combinations when we are doing a budget or forecast. Before using Anaplan, we used a mix of Excel and SAP BW with all the disadvantages; Excel had a risk of error and an inability to work with a group of users on the same data. When we first saw a demo of Anaplan, we really had a feeling this tool will really change our way of working. We were really impressed by the flexibility of the tool. It was really an easy tool, acting real-time, allowing us to treat a large amount of data.

The first success for us with Anaplan is that we have been able to implement the full scope of the budget, the forecast, and long-term planning.

Secondly, the user communicates actively using Anaplan; they are happy about the tool, they are really using the tool on a regular basis. They also recognized the added value of having Anaplan for the planning processes.

The last success for us is that we are really able to implement all business changes into Anaplan ourselves. We are mastering the tool, we can change the rules of the data models that are in the tool ourselves, and we can act rapidly, so when we have to do a simulation, a new forecast, a new budget for a specific project of the total company, we are really able to change, to model the system the way we want, and to make efficient and fast innovation.

Since Anaplan, we cannot imagine going back to the previous set-up we had. We are extremely satisfied about the tool and about the choice we made. On a daily basis, when we are working with Anaplan, we are wondering how we would have done this without Anaplan. We know that we can do even more with Anaplan and we are really looking forward to it.