About the Client
Supply Medium is a technology-driven organization specializing in cloud, data engineering, analytics, and enterprise financial solutions. As the company expanded its operations, it required a more efficient and automated budgeting process to improve financial planning, reporting, and decision-making across the organization.
Background
Each year, the FP&A team at Supply Medium prepares comprehensive financial and operational budgets. Using Anaplan for planning and forecasting, the team models projected revenues, expenses, and business performance before reconciling the data with the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for corporate reporting and executive decision-making.
While Anaplan and the EDW provided the foundation for budget planning, the integration between the two systems relied heavily on manual processes. This slowed planning cycles, increased the risk of errors, and reduced the team’s ability to focus on strategic financial analysis.
Challenge
The budget loading process was almost entirely manual.
Finance analysts were required to:
- Export budget and forecast data from Anaplan.
- Reformat and validate files to meet EDW requirements.
- Manually upload data into the Enterprise Data Warehouse.
This process created several business challenges:
- Slow Budget Cycles: Manual processing delayed financial planning and reporting.
- Higher Risk of Errors: Repetitive data handling increased the possibility of inaccurate financial information.
- Reduced Productivity: Skilled FP&A professionals spent valuable time preparing data instead of performing strategic financial analysis.
- Limited Scalability: Adding new business units, entities, or reporting structures required additional manual effort.
Solution
Supply Medium partnered with our team to automate the complete budget integration process between Anaplan and the Enterprise Data Warehouse.
Automated Data Integration
- Developed a secure, automated data pipeline that transferred budget and forecast data directly from Anaplan into the EDW.
- Eliminated manual file exports, transformations, and uploads.
Data Validation
- Implemented automated validation rules to ensure data quality and integrity before loading into the warehouse.
- Reduced reconciliation issues and improved confidence in financial reporting.
Faster Budget Availability
- Made budget and forecast data available within the EDW immediately at the start of each planning cycle.
- Enabled business users to access planning data without waiting for manual processing.
Scalable Architecture
- Designed the integration framework to support future growth.
- New entities, departments, business units, and reporting structures can be added with minimal configuration and no major redevelopment.
Outcome
The automated budget integration solution delivered measurable improvements for Supply Medium:
- Eliminated hours of repetitive manual budget loading during every planning cycle.
- Enabled FP&A teams to focus on strategic financial analysis rather than data preparation.
- Improved reporting accuracy by removing manual processing errors.
- Delivered budget and forecast data to the Enterprise Data Warehouse automatically at the beginning of each planning cycle.
- Accelerated reporting and provided leadership with earlier visibility into budget-versus-actual performance.
- Established a scalable financial planning framework capable of supporting future business growth and organizational expansion.