KUALA LUMPUR, 8 NOVEMBER 2009 – To reduce its financial planning cycle from three months to two weeks, Malaysian brewer Guinness Anchor [GAB] says it has turned to technology giant IBM for a business intelligence solution.
GAB financial planning and decisions support manager, Chan Mieng Chaan, said the company wants to improve its decision-making process as well as its productivity. “We found that a collective total of 480 hours were spent by employees daily, gathering information for budgeting and planning, which took valuable time away from focusing on business objectives and driving revenue-generating activities.”
Chan said the previous solution in place required significant manual work, which impacted data accuracy and slowed down information delivery to key decision-makers. “GAB’s budget planning process was heavily reliant on spreadsheets for information gathering, analysis, scenario planning, and what-if analysis. This resulted in very slow responses to stakeholders’ requests for information, which when available, lacked sufficient details and accuracy for real insight into how the business was performing.”
She said GAB’s management estimated that an additional US$3 million (RM10 million) dollars worth of business opportunities could have been realised each year, had decision-making been more efficient.
GAB, the leader in Malaysia’s beer and stout market with a 57 per cent market share, sells brands such as Tiger, Guinness, Heineken and Anchor.
Automated budget planning
“The financial department of every organisation needs smarter ways to drive profit and growth enterprise-wide,” said IBM Malaysia country manager, SWG [software group], Vincent Ler. “Analytics can free the office of finance from the burden of spreadsheet-based processes and help establish an efficient process of informing employees of mission-critical information that drives effective decision-making across the organisation.”
GAB’s Chan said: “With IBM business analytics, the entire budget planning process is now automated, eliminating potential errors arising from manual spreadsheet entries, ensuring that all information is accurate and can be quickly sent to stakeholders across the organisation.”
“The new analytics system also empowers budget-holders by giving them more control via continuous weekly or monthly reports while enabling scenario planning and what-if analysis of flexible rolling and profit-and-loss forecasts,” she added. “IBM is also helping GAB better track performance against strategic objectives, and guarantees the quality and accuracy of financial numbers for timely, sustainable compliance.”
“Because the new system frees up departments to focus more on their primary functions, staff morale has improved,” said Chan. “We have also significantly cut down the planning cycle time from three months to two weeks and now have the visibility to see more clearly where the business is headed when compared with our business goals and forecasts. This new insight will better help us to adapt plans and targets accordingly, to ensure we are on course with our growth plans. Furthermore, we now have more time for analysis.”
