VLTAVA LABE MEDIA a.s. - case study

Requirements

The aim of the project was to create a comprehensive planning and reporting system that was integrated with the data warehouse and would serve all companies in the Group. Consolidation within the Group was also required. The system had to take into account the specifics of several business activities.

It was planned at the level of the profit and loss, and the balance sheet.

The biggest problem with the existing system consisted of technological limitations; the individual operational and financial plans had been created in separate excel files and aggregating them and making changes, including distributing their impact to all related planning nodes, had been time consuming and carried the risk of introducing errors. Making changes, aggregation, consolidation or transfer of data to the data warehouse had required too many technological steps and checks.

Solution

We divided the project into a conceptual and an implementation phase. In the first phase, a concept was developed and agreed upon, defining the position of the new technology in the Group's IT environment, the functions and data interfaces of the individual tools. The cloud version of Oracle Planning and Budgeting was recommended for the planning support. The basic calculation units and planning processes were also defined.

We designed and subsequently implemented a robust solution for the customer based on a central model in cloud.The system is divided according to the organizational structure of the Group reflecting the types of business activities and also according to the types of revenues and costs.

The planning system supports the following processes that cover the entire financial planning cycle:

• Setting the configuration values of the next year's plan,
• Creation of in-kind and financial plans in the format of company income statements,
• Generation of financial plans in the form of a balance sheet,
• Approval of plans,
• Comparing plans with the reality and making forecasts,
• Data exchange with the surrounding systems.

The plans simulate consolidation of the results of the Group members and also automatically "re-bill" each other for the services provided. The services provided (i.e. the revenues of the provider) are transferred to the respective costs of the recipient of the service. This ensures the consistency of the plans. Capital expenditure and investment planning is also included.
Income statement formats are tailored to the sub-businesses to show the most important sources of revenue and costs for each company in the Group.
The balance sheet is generated from the turnover in the profit and loss accounts. Configurations are used to take account of invoice maturities, different VAT rates and stock movements.
The system is linked to a data warehouse with which it exchanges data. Actual data is retrieved from the data warehouse. Data is then exported to it for reporting purposes.
The security of the model is ensured at the level of individual roles, e.g. each user can only see their own data.