Story Homes Drives Business Growth by Connecting Operations and Finance with Anaplan
Story Homes Drives Business Growth by Connecting Operations and Finance with Anaplan
UK home building firm is using data analytics to ensure the success of the company’s growth plan
London – November 14, 2013 – To develop strategic growth plans and ensure successful house plot purchasing, UK home building firm Story Homes has chosen the fastest growing cloud-based modelling and planning solution for sales, operations and finance, Anaplan. Story Homes is now able to deliver faster, more accurate and interactive data analytics to support its rapid growth
Operating across Cumbria, the North East, Lancashire and Southern Scotland, Story Homes is experiencing a 60 percent year on year increase in the number of homes built. To accommodate this growth, Story Homes required a rapid deployment and a flexible solution that could match the fast rate of business change whilst collating vast quantities of data so that executives were able to allocate costs across different sites and reveal which house types and sites were operating profitably.
“Our main objective was to implement a solution that would put an end to the idiosyncratic modelling processes by bringing all the company’s data into one place,” said John Story, land valuation manager at Story Homes. “With Anaplan we can now collect far more information. We’ve become very aware of what makes us money and what doesn’t make us money, where we’re efficient and where we’re not efficient. We can now measure actual real-time results against our forecasts and predictions.”
With Anaplan, Story Homes is also now able to extend its long-range forecasts from one to fifteen years to enable informed land asset management decisions and improve the selection of sites. Forecasts are generated from the plot level up, helping to produce accurate regional and national sales predictions to an extremely granular level of detail. Reporting is instant, having taken up to a week using previous systems.
The usability of the Anaplan platform was radically different from Story Homes’ experiences with other planning systems. Story continued, “We’d tried other solutions, but they never caught on – people just stuck to Excel. For us, one of the biggest advantages with Anaplan was the spreadsheet-like usability – people felt they could understand it instantly.”
“Anaplan’s powerful and scalable platform will underpin Story Homes’ aggressive growth plans, arming the team with accurate, real-time data at every stage,” said Ian Stone, UK Managing Director at Anaplan. Creating dynamic scenarios and running real-time reports will enable Story Homes to gain a significant competitive advantage”.
About Story Homes
Twenty-five years of building experience has made the Story Homes name synonymous with superb design, beautiful properties, and liveable locations throughout Cumbria, the North East, Lancashire and Southern Scotland.
About Anaplan
Anaplan is disrupting the world of integrated business planning for sales, operations and finance. We built our platform from the ground up to empower companies to plan, collaborate, execute and react—in real time. Stay ahead of critical business events, rapidly model potential impacts and course correct on the fly. With Anaplan’s cloud-based platform, you can continuously align your people, plans and spend to your market opportunities. Anaplan is a privately held company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA with global offices on four continents. To learn more, visit anaplan.com. Join us on twitter: @anaplan