2degrees achieves self-sufficient build of enterprise-wide forecasting solution

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For New Zealand mobile phone company 2degrees, forecasting and reporting were challenging due to constant change. In a fully remote six-week implementation, the finance team brought sales, marketing, cost center, and other financial data into Anaplan to support real-time reporting and decision-making, then added a connected cash flow balance sheet. The results include increased transparency, better insight into business drivers, and, ultimately, better decisions.

One of the reasons we chose Anaplan was because we didn’t feel reliant on the services team. We saw the Anaplan team as an extra resource to bounce ideas off.
FP&A Manager

  • SOLUTIONS

    Finance

  • INDUSTRIES

    Telecom

Challenge

Highly complex modeling is common in the telecommunications industry. This meant that 2degrees’ finance team had to plan for many different scenarios including fluctuating rates, minutes, text bundles, and prepaid bundles. As handling such complexity in spreadsheets became nearly impossible, 2degrees looked for a solution with the power and flexibility to manage such daily change.

Solution

2degrees’ finance team required a cloud-based platform that could handle their reporting, forecasting, and planning needs. Many of the vendors that 2degrees evaluated required hefty consulting and configuration to get up to speed, but with Anaplan, the finance team had the confidence to easily build the models themselves. With Anaplan’s easy user interface, 2degrees proceeded with a fully remote implementation, resulting in a go-live in just six weeks.

Results

Anaplan was originally implemented for forecasting and budgeting, but quickly moved beyond to become 2degrees’ main financial-reporting platform. Instead of spending wasteful time searching for data in spreadsheets, the finance team could help senior management make real-time decisions and input real-time changes to the forecast.

Why Anaplan

“It was a bit of a no brainer, actually,” said 2degree’s FP&A Manager. “Once we got our hands on the Anaplan platform, we saw that it was the only system we could easily build ourselves. The others were too difficult to understand and required serious consulting dollars.”

2degrees Mobile is a mobile operator competing against the big guys in New Zealand. We launched about five years ago, and we have gone from strength to strength. We have a great market share. One of the great things about Anaplan is that it also fits in with our culture. We have a very friendly, collaborative culture. Anaplan allows us to focus on the big issues and talk them through, and it really complements it well.

We brought Anaplan in primarily to do our forecast and budgeting, but it’s moved beyond that to be a main reporting tool. The business loves it. They go in and get the results monthly. It’s giving you real-time information on-the-fly. You can run sensitivities if you need to, which allows the senior management team to make decisions, to input new changes to your forecast, and you get some results. We can then easily access every forecast-I don’t dread it anymore. I look forward to it because this is a chance for our business to get together and talk about plans for exciting months and have a change from the last forecast.

Previously, you would spend so much time focusing on pulling all your models in Excel®; now it’s about the value-added stuff. We set the price at the moment of rolling out dashboards across the business; it’s tailored to each user group to really enhance the understanding of the key focus areas.

Hi, I am Andrew Paston. I am the FP&A Manager at 2degrees Mobile.