How finance & operations aligned in Pigment for better forecasting & cost savings

At a glance

• Shaved 80% off monthly supply chain operations planning
• Time savings allowed for more robust volume forecasts
• This year the annual business planning took just 2 iterations, which were much quicker than previous years’ iterations in Excel
• The finance team is able to contribute more strategically to the business, challenging assumptions armed with accurate data and forecasts
• Put a lot of work into dashboards that would make it easier for non-technical team members to use Pigment
• Marketing team inputs directly into Pigment

From scattered spreadsheets to centralized planning

Before Pigment, Cheerz used Excel for all their business planning needs across the business. With so many functions relying on these spreadsheets to input data, plan for the future and make critical decisions, it was slowing them down massively. The supply chain team, for example, spent a full week every month just on operations planning, and the finance team spent most of their time wrangling different versions and trying to consolidate data across the company’s various opcos.

Not only did Cheerz want a way to save time on planning processes, but they also knew that there was a better solution to enable the finance and operations teams to contribute strategically to the business. This search led them to Pigment, which they were able to implement in just two months. This includes their P&L reporting, annual budgeting and supply chain forecasting.

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More effective cross-team collaboration in Pigment

One of the most important success factors was for other team members to be able to contribute and input directly. Knowing how critical this would be to the success of the rollout, the team invested time and thought into dashboards designed to make inputs and insights as accessible as possible. This has now made it so that other business partners, including the marketing team, can input directly into Pigment, rather than versions of Excel that may or may not be the right version.

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80% time savings on monthly supply chain planning

Now that the business planning process is in Pigment, the finance team has been able to increase the frequency of their planning from twice yearly to monthly due to how fast and flexible planning is in Pigment.

Additionally, the operations team’s formerly-week-long monthly planning process now takes less than a day, resulting in an 80% time savings that they’ve been able to use to improve forecasts and model additional use cases within the platform.

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Better forecasts to enable data-driven decision making

Their forecast is also more granular and accurate, and therefore the team is able to make confident decisions based on the business data. This also allows the operations team to save money within the supply chain, better predicting both workforce capacity and now even materials costs. The full supply chain is now being modeled in Pigment, with plans to continue to expand their use cases to continue their mission towards fully unified and connected business planning.

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