Modernizing Corporate Planning & Reporting for a Media Conglomerate
The Situation
A Fortune 500 media and telecommunications conglomerate engaged Accordion to improve its corporate planning and reporting processes. Despite having several mature CPM solutions across the Company’s varied businesses, the Finance team lacked a single source of truth for monthly management and external reporting. They relied on time-consuming and error-prone spreadsheets to combine data from various sources to produce their trending schedules. The corporate business unit also lacked a tool for the planning and budgeting of corporate functions (i.e., shared services, real estate, etc.). The key business goal was to get a more holistic view of the various business segments while supporting highly tailored, business-unit-specific planning requirements.
Services
Budgeting/Forecasting Solution Implementation
Close/Consolidation Solution Implementation
Reporting & Analytics
The Execution
- Partnered closely with FP&A leaders to develop a chart of accounts that would be used for all reporting.
- Developed automated data integrations from several mature CPM systems, as well as facilitated manual inputs, to collect the required level of granularity to enable reporting.
- Facilitated net income, cash flow, and metric reporting (subscribers, attendance, treasury, etc.) in a single model for one-stop reporting.
- Implemented automated plugs and checks to ensure that the data collected tied to summary-level data sourced from their book-of-record.
- Worked closely with the corporate business unit FP&A team to understand their planning requirements.
- Implemented a flexible, driver-based planning model tailored to the corporate function’s budget, forecast, and LRP cycles, including automated integration from a separate workforce model with the overall reporting platform.
- Leveraged the new, implemented CPM platform to enable rolling forecast, scenario modeling, FX flexing, and variance analysis that were not easily achieved previously.
- Identified and executed on additional enhancements and functionality to extend the capabilities of the CPM platform.
- Built intuitive and flexible dashboards and reporting to allow self-serve reporting for business leaders.
The Results
Accordion implemented a CPM system that allowed the Company’s senior leaders to seamlessly collect/analyze data, plan, and report across all of their business units (at a level of granularity that was not previously possible with existing systems). The corporate planning model reduced the FP&A team’s manual effort and shaved significant time off their planning cycles. Marking the Company’s first step toward achieving a connected planning framework, Accordion’s implemented solution has since evolved into other use cases/models that also integrate with the platform as the Company’s CPM landscape continues to develop.