Solocal reinvents its sales forecasts with Beyond Plans, thanks to a tailor-made implementation of the Anaplan platform. The result: processing time cut in half and highly improved data reliability.
Known for its directories printed under the name of the famous “Pages Jaunes”, Solocal has made a remarkable leap into the digital age, establishing itself as a leader in local communication services in France. At the time, Solocal was in the midst of its digital transformation, yet it had to contend with a long and complex forecasting process, involving multiple collaborators and a large volume of disparate data. The forecasting process, which at the time was based on Excel, was considered “painful”, and deprived the company of good reactivity in terms of decision-making.
“Producing a forecast scenario took around 2 months,” confides Clémence Pieyre, Management Control Manager at Solocal. “But despite this long lead time, we weren’t able to run simulations reactively or produce precise analyses on sales or turnover. A real frustration!”
Reinventing forecasting
Faced with these difficulties, and after a POC, Solocal decided to call on Beyond Plans to reshape its approach to sales forecasting around the Anaplan platform.
Prior to the project, a three-day training session is held to familiarize the Solocal team with the Anaplan tool, its philosophy and capabilities. This is an important step in enabling the team to project themselves into the use of the tool and understand the possibilities it offers.
This is followed by a series of workshops, each dedicated to a specific feature of the forecasting system. The aim here is to jointly define a design that considers both Solocal’s organizational constraints and the list of desired functionalities. These collaborative sessions proved essential in aligning Solocal’s expectations with Anaplan’s capabilities.
Based on the specifications defined during the workshops, the Beyond Plans team then organized the development (or “build”) of the system in sprints. This agile method made it possible to build the solution progressively, with test and validation phases for each stage, for a modular and adaptable implementation.
Challenges, but on schedule and on budget
During the build phase, it became apparent that certain data crucial to the modeling of past sales was missing, due in particular to the high data complexity of the project. This discovery led to a reversal of the sprint order, to give Solocal’s IT team the time they needed to prepare the required data. Proposed by Beyond Plans, this readjustment enabled the project to stay on track without compromising the overall schedule, which was ultimately delayed by just one week… and without any budget overruns.
Towards continuous process improvement
Beyond Plans’ deployment of Anaplan has drastically reduced the time needed to produce a forecast scenario, while increasing the accuracy and reliability of the data. Managers at Solocal can now run detailed simulations and analyses, to quickly answer the most strategic questions or adjust their forecasts in real time.
The integration of Anaplan has become central to Solocal’s management strategy, and facilitates continuous process improvement. The tool has also paved the way for subsequent evolutions, such as the modeling of cash flow forecasts, implemented in just two weeks thanks to Beyond Plans’ expertise on the platform.
