Expanding Anaplan to enterprise-wide, consolidated management
Ebara expanded its use of Anaplan to enterprise-wide consolidated management, integrating profit and loss (P&L) balance sheet (BS), and cash flow (CF) data from its headquarters and roughly 100 domestic and overseas subsidiaries. “There had been an idea to use a single, unified tool for data collection across the entire organization,” recalls Ryusei Yamamoto of the Corporate Management Section. “We started with fixed-cost budgeting as a foundation and gradually expanded Anaplan’s use to enterprise-wide consolidated management.”
Standardizing enterprise-wide consolidation requires the introduction of an integrated tool that can be used across the entire organization. Ryusei Yamamoto highlights the background of adopting Anaplan as a company-wide tool, saying: “Anaplan allowed us to review prototypes frequently and refine requirements interactively rather than locking everything down at the start. This ability to adjust and evolve the model as we went along was extremely beneficial.”
Ryusei Yamamoto also notes that Anaplan delivers superior performance compared with the previous budgeting tool: “Anaplan runs much more smoothly. From a user’s perspective, system responsiveness really matters.” Since the 2024 go-live of the enterprise-wide consolidation model, he gives high praise to Anaplan’s performance in real-time data aggregation and analysis.
Additionally, Takeshi Watanabe, Corporate Management Section Manager, describes another advantage of using Anaplan as follows: “In the past, every time a department updates its numbers, we had to pass spreadsheets around like a relay. But with Anaplan, everything from data collection to report creation can be done within one platform, so that process is now unnecessary.”
Kazuhito Yamamoto from the same section also highlights the dramatic benefits of Anaplan. “Report preparation used to tie us up for nearly a week,” he explains. “Now, we simply download the data that has been entered. What once required several people can now be handled by just one.”
Visualizing the approval process with Anaplan Workflow
Since 2024, Ebara has worked on visualizing the approval process by leveraging Anaplan Workflow. “Our previous system also had an approval feature, but users gave negative reviews,” explains Takeshi Watanabe. “We decided to address that challenge by using Anaplan, which offers workflow capabilities as a standard feature.”
The company also faced issues with accountability when approvals were submitted on behalf of others. Akira Fuse from the same section notes: “It is important to clearly visualize who submitted and who approved each item. Anaplan Workflow’s tree structure makes the entire approval history instantly visible and easy to trace.”
Scaling Anaplan across the enterprise
Ebara is planning to use Anaplan for capital investment budgeting. The company is also in the process of implementing a new ERP system, and Takeshi Watanabe envisions an even greater role for Anaplan: “We see Anaplan serving as the front-end platform for all budget input processes.”
From an IT organization’s perspective, Yutaka Hoshiko of the Accounting and HR Systems Section, Corporate Systems Department, highlights what is in store for them: “Anaplan allows users to directly input and output the data they need, which is a major benefit. Beyond data collection, its simulation capabilities are a real strength. Our goal is to maximize the use of this standardized tool across the company, so we hope to see departments beyond accounting and HR also make use of its simulation features.”
