Serving up More Efficient General & Administrative Budgeting

Every day, this popular fast food restaurant chain serves hundreds of thousands of customers. Their annual budgeting process has to account for over a billion dollars spent across items like employee wages, maintenance, landscaping and operating supplies. The top-down/bottom-up method of preparing the annual General and Administrative (G&A) budget required the Finance team to email a series of standalone Excel spreadsheets to other users for the purpose of planning expenses for 90 departments. The Finance team then manually uploaded received spreadsheet data into an Oracle Essbase database for analysis. Although painful, this process eventually gave the Finance team a consolidated view of the year’s expenses. Management felt there had to be a better way to plan the costs of food, paper, labor, utilities and the other expenses necessary to run a large chain of restaurants. As a result, they set their sights on a new and configurable budgeting system. After outlining a list of main criteria for the new system, they collectively decided to seek one that could best leverage their existing Excel infrastructure because they didn’t want to spend months implementing and training users on a net-new application.

Management decided to decommission their legacy Oracle Enterprise Financial Reporting System and move to a software solution that could be configured to work with their business. They wanted to speed up their overall budgeting process from start to finish and improve the productivity of department heads and the Finance team. The G&A budgeting process exhausted a considerable amount of employee time. Management wanted the new process to be one that allowed managers to focus their time and energy on more value-added tasks. The Finance group would internally prepare 90 budget templates in Excel for G&A expense planning. These spreadsheets were sent to a group of 30 managers, many with budgeting responsibilities for multiple departments. Each manager would review their plans against the spreadsheet allocations, enter their financial data into the template and return the completed version to the Finance team by email. Once the templates were returned, the Finance team uploaded them into the Essbase database for the purposes of consolidation and report generation. The process was cumbersome enough to necessitate many overtime hours. Management began seeking a solution that offered simplicity and control. They wanted their users to make a smooth transition to the new system – to minimize downtime and training needs – and concluded that a solution that leveraged Excel in one way or another would be ideal. However, management also needed the centralized control and automated consolidation capabilities found in most premium Corporate Performance Management (CPM) systems.

The restaurant eventually chose Vena to support their G&A Budget Planning process. Vena’s consultants worked hand-in-hand with the Finance team to configure the system so that members could roll out their budgeting templates with embedded business rules. The Finance team wanted to make sure that everyone respected their targets and could be prevented from exceeding them. Using Vena, the Finance team also designed processes in such a way that managers can request that users attach additional costs to their submissions. These requests are now submitted and consolidated inside Vena before being presented to senior management. Vena’s consultants used a proven set of methodologies specifically designed for the CPM market when implementation time came around. The consultants delivered a concise, phased approach that facilitated creative solutions and structured thinking during system planning and implementation. The fact that managers were not giving up the spreadsheets they knew was one of the factors that allowed for a smooth implementation. As another Finance manager notes, “It was a very short learning curve. We held a lot of one-hour sessions for all the users across the country. And after that one-hour training session, people were very capable of using the system on their own.” It was important to management that the Finance team receive timely and meaningful support from their vendor of choice. They were pleased with the commitment and breadth of knowledge Vena’s consultants have displayed throughout the implementation process. As the Director of FP&A, acknowledges, “Any questions that we’ve had… or when we’ve encountered a little bit of an obstacle, we’ve just had to reach out to one of the guys at Vena, and they’ve given us the help that we need.”

• The Finance team completes their budget planning a week earlier than before in a low-maintenance environment that everyone understands.
• The new process allows managers to focus their time and energy on more value-added tasks.
• The implementation of Vena facilitated a smooth transition with minimal training required for users.
• The Finance team received timely and meaningful support from Vena’s consultants throughout the implementation process.
• The new system allowed for centralized control and automated consolidation capabilities, improving overall efficiency.

• The Finance team completes their budget planning a week earlier than before.