Anaplan brings automation and visibility to Glide Group’s finance team
On a mission to connect and empower people, communities, and businesses, Glide Group – a market-leading infrastructure and utilities business – delivers hyper-fast connectivity across the UK and Europe. The company owns a national full fibre network, reaching over 100,000 premises, and brings high-performance fibre to sectors and areas that are difficult to access and service, from student and built-to-rent accommodations to shared HMO living and business parks.
Providing customers with fast, reliable solutions requires Glide to operate with agility, visibility, and efficiency. For Glide’s finance team, this meant re-imagining their FP&A processes – moving away from a static, spreadsheet-based approach to a more flexible, real-time planning platform. “Several years ago, I attended a workshop where Anaplan invited different companies to try out their platform for the purpose of planning, reporting and analysis,” said Samuel Mason, Head of FP&A at Glide. “We recently embarked on a journey to transition away from spreadsheets and I recalled the flexibility of Anaplan from that workshop years ago, so I got back in touch and decided to roll the platform out at Glide.”
Empowered by the Anaplan platform, Glide is now able to plan more confidently, with greater visibility into performance across the business. The company worked with partner Bedford Consulting to drive implementation. “Now we have our Budget, Actuals and Forecasts in a single environment – the Balance Sheet, Cash Flow & P&L are all interlinked from Sales down to an EBITDA level, and changes flow through the model automatically,” said Mason.
Anaplan has also enabled the finance team to partner closely with other departments and have more meaningful conversations with decision makers across the business. “In contrast to Excel the key differences with Anaplan are agility, automation, and the flexibility to make a change to any planning model.”
Based on early success, Glide has ambitions to leverage Anaplan to drive greater efficiencies across the business in the years to come. As Mason notes, “the next step in our Anaplan journey is to focus on the 5-year plan, and to push out enhanced visualizations, KPIs, and analytics to our Executive Team. We want to transform Glide into a truly self-service business and we’re looking to Anaplan to support that transition.”
To learn more about the ways Anaplan helps businesses deliver on their strategic objectives through effective planning, visit /customers.