CME removes many manual processes and improves productivity of the finance team

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At Prague-based CME—Central European Media Enterprises—inconsistent and error-prone data made financial planning and analysis slow and manual. With Anaplan, they have flexible, multidimensional plans that are owned by the finance team. CME can change plans and models in real time as the business evolves, which has freed up time for actionable analysis.
In recent budgeting meetings, it was apparent that the detail and information we were capturing in Anaplan had actually helped to fuel discussions. Rather than focusing on other irrelevant issues, we can now get straight into the detail.
Senior Manager

  • SOLUTIONS

    Finance

Challenge

CME’s FP&A team was experiencing the inherent problems associated with spreadsheets—inconsistent and error prone data. They wanted to avoid the wasted time spent on versioning, crashing of software, and the very manual process of keeping data consistent across spreadsheets and business functions so they sought to a new solution.

 

 

Results

There was an immediate positive reaction from the senior management team at CME, including the CFO and SVP of Operations. They were very impressed with the level of detail the Anaplan platform was able to capture. Due to this level of detail, the finance team was able to get right into the actionable analysis – freeing up important time generally spent discussing irrelevant points

 

 

Solution

Above all, CME was looking to incorporate a tool that was able to drive transparency and collaboration across the organization. After bringing in Anaplan, the FP&A team easily adapted to the platform and quickly began to appreciate the multitude of different dimensions the platform could provide—especially the ability to change the models in real-time as the business or the team evolved.

My name is Deborah Cleaver. I’m Senior Manager at Group FP&A at CME based in Prague. We’ve had a really positive reaction from our senior management team. After we had built the models and were ready to roll them out to the teams in the local operations, we did a demonstration for our CFO and our SVP of Operations.

And we took them through a couple of the more detailed models. And they were hugely impressed with the level of detail that we were able to capture, and how we were able to capture that and create a driver-based forecast for them.

And recently in the budget meetings that we’ve been holding it’s become very apparent that the detail and the information that we’re capturing, Anaplan has actually helped to fuel those discussions. So that rather than focusing on, you know, other issues that are not relevant, we can get straight into the detail.

I think our ‘aha’ moment was when we, we sat down right at the very beginning of the process, before we had even really been in Anaplan. And we sat down with Andrew, Andrew Gould, and took him through our sales model, which we feel is probably the part of our business which we’re very familiar with, quite complex in terms of modeling, but we felt that we understood that very well.

And it uses a lot of dimensions from the model. We took him through that, and he went away, and within 24 hours had turned around a model that actually we could have used. And I think it was that part that made us go, “Yes. This is the product that we should be using.”

I think one of the best features of Anaplan is the fact that it gives control and ownership and flexibility to our FP&A team, because it means they own the models. They are able to change those models as the business is evolving, and as we learn new thing when we incorporate user feedback, and I think that’s a great plus for us.