Data is the fuel for growth and profitability at Echo Global Logistics, but key data was hard to access in the company’s spreadsheet-based planning process. Building the annual budget used to take six months of 14-hour days and was completely finance-owned, while leaders lacked visibility into current performance. Moving the process to Anaplan made the planning process completely transparent and data-driven, created greater collaboration with the business, enabled year-round analysis and monitoring of KPIs for accountability, and shortened the entire planning process from six months to two. All of these improvements made with Anaplan support profitable, agile responses to changing business conditions.
Anaplangave us flexibility to look at the business in ways that we didn’t have before, which has had a positive impact on our profitability.
Pete Rogers， 首席财务官，Echo Global Logistics
Echo Global Logistics是一家基于非资产的物流公司，这意味着它可以满足35,000多个客户的物流需求，但没有卡车。如何？通过与50,000多个运营商（包括各种尺寸的车队）合作，回波找到了运送负载的运输工具，然后将承运人与另一个负载（通常来自另一个客户的负载）连接起来，从而将卡车和驾驶员再次带回家。Echo的财务副总裁Brett Lukowicz说：“我们可以降低客户的运输成本，并为承运人赚更多的钱。”“我们是中介，这就是我们为客户和运营商提供价值的方式。”
数据是该业务模型中盈利能力和增长的燃料。回声的数据越多，做出决策并以推动收入和客户满意度的方式为客户服务时，它的越快和敏捷性就越越快。随着公司的成长，财务数据被困在过时的系统中，年度预算花了六个月的时间为14小时，在电子表格中构建，该电子表格将强大的计算机急剧停止。卢科维奇回忆说：“我们一直落后了几个月。”“我们仍在三月份建立预算，当时领导人想要一月的绩效数据。”
And when the budget was finally complete, it belonged exclusively to finance; business users couldn’t use the data for day-to-day decision-making. Echo needed a planning solution that supported the company’s growth by bringing speed and accuracy to the budgeting process and enabling collaborative planning and decision-making across the entire company.
了解业务
在评估了几种替代方案之后，Echo在2016年选择了Anaplan，并着手建立更好的预算过程。卢科维奇（Lukowicz）和他的团队从他们已经知道的东西开始，但努力进行操作：Echo收入的一半以上来自特定的客户。Lukowicz说：“我们意识到，如果我们对这些客户在接下来的12-15个月内发货的准确了解，那么我们将对所有Echo的收入预测有很好的了解。”
Echo的销售和运营经理由约70名与客户沟通的团队成员组成，开始将有关客户计划的信息输入Anaplan。卢科维奇说：“他们必须每月做这一次，其中许多人每周（甚至每天）都这样做。”
该公司还针对Anaplan的员工生产力输入了广泛的历史数据。计划者知道回声操作员每天可以安排多少负载；每天可以处理多少帐户和可偿还帐户的文员的发票；员工流失和晋升率；和其他员工数据。
具有准确的销售预测anddetailed employee metrics in Anaplan, Echo can precisely forecast the people required to serve clients’ needs. By also incorporating salaries, commissions, benefits, and other people costs, the company creates an accurate workforce budget—which accounts for 85% of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses for Echo. The remaining budget data is completed by business unit leaders in Anaplan as well. This includes vendor expense planning, travel and entertainment (T&E) spend, and other professional services that end-users enter themselves. This all leads to a budget that is quickly summarized and available to Echo’s executive team for sign-off.
Lukowicz notes that building the budget from the sales forecast up wasn’t a new idea at Echo. “What’s revolutionary with Anaplan is the collaborative nature of the process,” Lukowicz says. “Sales managers provide forecasts, finance builds budgets from those forecasts, and leadership reviews and revises plans that are live and interactive. And it’s all done in about eight weeks—a couple of months’ worth of time savings—without working late nights and weekends. We have a collaborative budget with Anaplan, and I have my life back.”
Beyond budgeting
Once Echo built a better budget with Anaplan, Lukowicz and his finance team didn’t stop there. In the years since its initial rollout, Anaplan has enabled capabilities and analyses that were inconceivable before, including:
- Budget updates, rolling forecasts, and detailed reporting.以前，Echo没有产生季度预算更新，而仅提供高级数据以进行收益。卢科维奇说：“使用Anaplan，每月都会跟踪多个生产力KPI，始终可以访问当前数据，并且细节是钻探的。”“作为一家上市公司，我们被认为是高标准的全面，准确的财务报告，我们可以与Anaplan达到这一标准。”
- 盈利能力分析。Before Anaplan, it took up to three days to determine the profitability of a client. Now that information is immediately available by simply adjusting a time scale, so Echo can easily identify underperforming accounts and quickly formulate a plan to fulfill the needs of the client and Echo. These analyses are done on a monthly basis and create collaboration across business units including sales, operations, and finance.
- Calculation of bonuses.Anaplan能够从激励薪酬团队中删除复杂的奖金计算，从而节省了超过50％的所需过程时间。它还使经理们能够根据当前趋势投射自己的奖金，因为他们现在可以了解正在制定的每项计算以及未来几个月的投入选项。
- 更大的问责制。Because both the budget and expense tracking reside in Anaplan, managers can see their status and better govern spending against their plan.
快速方案建模
“我们现在有能力,曾经是impossible,” Pete Rogers, Echo’s CFO, says. “Anaplan gave us flexibility to look at the business in ways that we didn’t have before, which has had a positive impact on our profitability.” The value of that flexibility became very clear when COVID-19 hit, and Echo’s business took a dramatic swerve. Shipping for goods like toilet paper accelerated, even as some clients suddenly cut forecasted shipments to zero.
Lukowicz回忆说：“我们的团队立即看到了大流行的财务影响，并使用Anaplan来为管理产生响应方案。”“金融必须在上下提供期望，预测，预测，以及它们对资产负债表，现金流以及对领导力的信用额度的影响，以便他们采取行动。我们迅速康复，拥有有史以来最高的收入季度。”
And that type of rapid, profit-driving response is helping to deliver the message of Anaplan’s value impact throughout the company. “People across Echo see the power of what can be done with Anaplan,” Lukowicz concludes. “As we build it out, other teams are getting more of that ‘wow’ factor that we in finance had when we first partnered with Anaplan.”
