Enterprise Planning for a Leading Entertainment Provider

Challenge
The client, one of the largest privately held programmers of cable television shows worldwide with over $1 billion dollars of annual revenue, was experiencing extremely rapid growth. As a result of this expansion, corporate budgeting and planning processes, fraught with inefficiencies, required over seven months to complete. Excel spreadsheets developed by the corporate finance staff needed to be distributed to the remote offices, collected, consolidated and analyzed. End user manipulation of Excel spreadsheets hindered this consolidation process, and issues with version control, inconsistent assumptions and lack of analytical abilities caused inconsistencies. Moreover, the International Division experienced further complexity due to multiple currencies and languages as well as time zone differences.

Engagement
We were engaged to develop and implement an Enterprise Planning application that would meet the following objectives:

• Enhance and ensure data accuracy across the organization
• Streamline and automate the planning and forecast process
• Incorporate local requirements into a consistent solution for the entire company
• Allow for centralized development and maintenance
• Isolate inefficiencies and increase process automation

Solution
The solution leveraged IBM Cognos Enterprise Planning utilizing Contributor to collect the budgets, Analyst for consolidation and the Analyst Excel Add-in for reporting. Two Contributor applications were developed: an Affiliate Revenue application to plan contracts for the affiliates that purchased the programming and an Expense application to collect expense budgets by cost center. The budget data was published and fed into an Analyst application that allocated the costs by cost center to the appropriate profit center.

Due to the operational differences between the various regions, the Affiliate Revenue application was complex. A central application was designed for both the Asia and Latin America regions to allow for accurate planning over a 5-year timeframe. Users entered a variety of drivers to create accurate revenues and subscriber growth plans. The Expense application allowed users to create a budget by cost center by general ledger account, and a Travel and Entertainment module allowed users to budget based on key drivers. To ensure the total budget would accurately reflect business trends, an inflation factor was applied. Finally, end users allocated costs to profit centers by entering an allocation mechanism that had built in data movements and quality accuracy checks.

On a regular basis, sometimes several times a day, the information would be published from Contributor and then imported into Analyst where the allocations and consolidations would take place. After this consolidation occurred, a P&L statement was available by each individual profit center. These statements were then sliced and diced in numerous ways for reporting purposes. The model had added complexity due to three different P&L structures that had to be maintained at all times for statutory reasons. The final output was the Shareholder Report, a print ready Excel workbook that was created completely in Analyst and delivered via the Analyst Excel Add-in. All steps were automated so as to require as little human intervention as possible.

Results
The client benefited greatly from the implementation of the solution. The process of allocating and consolidating each successive pass of the budget, which previously required several days of manually intensive labor, was reduced to a four-hour automated process. In addition, changes to the planning process, of which there were many, could be implemented quickly with full confidence in data accuracy. Maintenance of the application was straightforward as best practice design principles, many authored by Rolling Forecast Solutions, LLC were used throughout the planning system.