Pixartprinting's Transformation: Streamlining Cross-Departmental Coordination with Intelligent Planning Platform

Pixartprinting is a leading European company in customized online printing services, based in northeast Italy. The company offers a wide range of services, including printing of magazines, catalogs, labels, packaging, and textiles. With a team of 1,200 passionate and talented individuals, Pixartprinting handles up to 15,000 print jobs a day, making its online presence possible. The company aims to provide a complete, professional service that supports its customers’ communication projects. Founded in 1994, Pixartprinting has grown to become a major player in the online printing services industry.

Pixartprinting, a major European player in online printing services, was facing challenges in automating its planning processes. The company was using Excel for strategic planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes, but this approach was proving inadequate for the new competitive market challenges. The company was also undergoing a simultaneous change in the ERP system in some of its branches, making it the right time to replace the spreadsheet-based approach with a more advanced solution. The main challenge was the lack of collaboration across departments due to a data-silos approach and information redundancy. This resulted in difficulties in driving planning, forecasting, and business modeling processes. Pixartprinting needed a tool that could provide a comprehensive view of the company’s information, ensure fast responses when querying databases, make scenario simulation easier and more intuitive, and automate relevant planning and analytics processes.

Pixartprinting adopted the Board Intelligent Planning Platform to automate and streamline its planning processes. The implementation of the platform covered three main areas: closing management, financial planning with integrated business planning (IBP) methodology, and sales performance management (SPM). The company also built a capacity plan for the print machines using the same Board database architecture and planning platform, which fed into the HR planning process. With Board's flexibility and the extensive range of capabilities in the Intelligent Planning Platform, Pixartprinting defined an S&OP process across the organization. The platform facilitated reporting automation, P&L planning, net working capital planning, CapEx planning, profitability analysis, extended planning and analysis to HR, marketing, and IT departments, automatic monthly sales budgeting, daily sales forecasting, sales analytics, sales profitability, and capacity planning.

• The implementation of the Board Intelligent Planning Platform has transformed Pixartprinting's planning, forecasting, and scenario management processes. The platform has enabled end-to-end planning across the company's key departments, fostering collaboration and eliminating data silos. The standardization of the planning environment has brought together all relevant information from different departments and planning cycles, facilitating a more comprehensive view of the company's operations. The platform's reporting automation feature has increased the speed of reaction, enabling the fast generation of actionable insights. The unified financial and non-financial planning has streamlined budgeting and forecasting processes for various departments. The reduction of non-value-added activities has freed up the FP&A team to focus on improved data analysis and valuable what-if analysis. The faster HR planning has been a significant enhancement gained through the IBP approach.

• Standardization of the planning environment: Unified architecture and database gather all relevant information from different departments and planning cycles.

• Higher speed of reaction: Reporting automation enables the fast generation of actionable insights from information.

• Unified financial and non-financial planning: The platform creates budgets and forecasts for finance, sales & marketing, production, and HR.