OREANDA-NEWS. December 29, 2012. CROC has upgraded its business planning system for several hundred workplaces. The project has streamlined operations, reduced the time needed for business planning, multi-level validation and sales budget approval, and improved information quality.

Developed back in 2006, the previous planning and budgeting system ceased to meet the company's needs as CROC’s business has since more than doubled and diversified significantly in terms of lines and budgetable parameters. A year ago, it was decided to optimize business planning processes. As a result, CROC reviewed its budgeting methodology and new approaches to automation in general.

"During the planning process, we focus on organic growth. This is why we prefer to consider the potential of our sales managers, rather than top-down planning," says Alexey Pavlenko, IT Director, CROC. "While this approach is not supported by the majority of budgeting systems, it took us several months to understand which system would require less customization and at one point we seriously considered custom development. However, eventually we found an offbeat but highly effective solution – a real-time integration of the IBM Cognos TM1 budgeting system and CROC's enterprise CRM. Through our integration platform and master data management (MDM) system, we managed to achieve seamless integration."

"The budgeting capabilities of two different interfaces significantly expanded the functionality of the new system. IBM Cognos TM1 Web makes the perception of complicated budgetary forms as easy as possible, with tables now being even more user friendly. Meanwhile, IBM Cognos Contributor provides control over the budgeting process at all validation levels, and the ability to analyze and verify data from different angles: line directors, sales managers, department directors and economists. A single point of access for end users is provided via the system enterprise portal. In addition, CROC’s sales budgeting process algorithms were also updated. Such seamless integration made it possible to run plan/actual analysis of the projects in real time," says Maxim Andreev, Head of Business Application Practice at CROC.

"This new budgeting system totally meets our needs and has successfully passed the pilot production stage. Today, we can make quick changes according to the budgeting process, carry out qualitative analysis and automatically generate 'online' reports and presentation materials for executives. It is now easier to operate the system – something which is critically important when the budgeting process involves hundreds of specialists from various departments of the company," notes Natalia Gribanova, CFO, CROC.

"Our platform has increased the efficiency of a process which is critical to CROC's business given the upcoming tasks and the growing number of users. Multivariable data is processed in real time and analysts are now able to tailor their analytical environment and quickly respond to varying business conditions," adds Alexander Tikhonov, Head of IBM BI Practice in Russia and CIS.