Amann Girrbach increases efficiency and performance of sales planning

A precise sales planning solution with forecasting, budgeting, and medium-term planning

Amann Girrbach had already engaged another consulting firm to set up a sales planning solution in Anaplan, however the results were unsatisfactory. Among other things, the performance of the calculations and forecasts was too slow, and the models incorporated did not correspond to proven best practices. valantic was called in, and, with its experienced Anaplan consultants, successfully turned the project around to meet Amann Girrbach’s needs.

Amann Girrbach is very satisfied, particularly with the high performance and connectivity of their integrated planning solution from Anaplan. Manual effort has reduced significantly.

valantic‘s consultants stepped in when Amann Girrbach was unsatisfied with the results of another consulting firm’s Anaplan sales planning project implementation. Important business requirements were not met, and the system performance left a lot to be desired. Therefore, to restore the customer‘s confidence and set up an environment for successful project completion, valantic first needed to develop a goal-oriented plan with flexible project management. After taking stock of the planning module, the experienced consultants created milestones to work through sequentially. After each milestone, Amann Girrbach reserved the option to terminate the planning project if they were unsatisfied with how the requirements were met.

The milestone plan consisted of three phases: (1) forecast for the current fiscal year; (2) budget planning for the next year; and (3) medium-term planning (MIP) for future years. The goal was to enable Amann Girrbach‘s managers to plan sales per product and per region at various levels of granularity and time horizons, and to derive costs, revenue, and profitability from this information.

The sales planning project was jointly delivered by valantic and Amann Girrbach team members with the highest quality standards. And, due to the previous consulting firm’s shortcomings, the team faced an additional level of pressure to succeed.

„Several times a year, we plan the future months for the current year. The plan values of the past months are then replaced by actual values,“ says Petra Bernsteiner, Team Leader Controlling at Amann Girrbach, explaining the planning process. „First, the product managers plan top-down, either at the quantity or net sales level depending on the situation. Then the sales managers take over and plan the net sales per product group and country. Subsequently, the controlling department then makes any necessary adjustments,“ she continues.

valantic implemented all of Amann Girrbach‘s requirements and integrated proven best practices in Anaplan. These included, for example, more efficient data structures, a clearer arrangement of the individual modules, and the reduction of unnecessary complexity, which only slowed down performance. The valantic and Amann Girrbach teams also worked very well together to optimize business processes and calculation logics.