Gabriel Chemie Ensures Perfect Interaction of Data Analytics and Integrated Planning With Fiplana

• Group-wide web-based solution for sales budgeting and forecasting

• Reporting, analysis, planning and forecasting via a unified all-in-one platform

GABRIEL-CHEMIE is very successful in pursuing a growth strategy through acquisitions. The increasing number of plants has led to a heterogeneous IT system landscape, resulting in inadequate options to consolidate key figures at the group level, explains Alexandra Eckelhart, Corporate Controller at Gabriel-Chemie. "In some country subsidiaries, including the headquarters in Austria, the ERP system proAlpha is used, albeit in different versions. Russia and Italy utilize their own systems. The data provided to us is in Excel format. Consequently, developing analyses for management and other stakeholders within the company has been time-consuming." The company sought an efficient solution to consolidate all group figures from various source systems coherently and provide them for analysis, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting. They intended to implement a business intelligence (BI) solution that not only consolidates data and allows flexible evaluation but also offers user-friendly planning functions.

IT-side

Controlling

• The planning was still done using Excel, which was time-consuming and lacked transparency for the employees.

• Reporting, analysis, planning and forecasting via a single point of truth

At GABRIEL-CHEMIE, Qlik Sense is used as the data integration and analytics platform. The required planning functionality is provided by Fiplana from INFORM DataLab. The extension has been in use for 7 years. It allows users to plan quickly and in detail at various levels, perform top-down and bottom-up planning, and conduct planning based on actual historical data. Due to its high user-friendliness, Fiplana can be easily utilized across departments, such as for cost and revenue planning, budgeting and forecasting, sales planning and control, as well as project planning and marketing controlling. Data can be created and edited directly in the Fiplana interface and can be written back to various databases. Input masks or fields can be freely chosen. Options include free text or dropdown fields, as well as checkboxes. Additionally, data can also be edited using mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones.