Panasonic Homes saves 2,000 hours per year by using Anaplan
Panasonic Homes is a comprehensive homebuilder whose core business is constructing custom-built houses, such as single-family dwellings and apartment buildings. The company provides not only the custom-built houses but also, asset utilization support for landowners, urban development, renovation, real estate leasing, and management service, from purchasing to selling properties. Furthermore, the company operates not only in Japan but also in Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and New Zealand.
Panasonic Homes conducts “accounting for management” that combines financial and management accounting. When making business plans, the company has, up to now, used general spreadsheet software to aggregate plan data received from nationwide sales branches, domestic and overseas consolidated subsidiaries, and equity method affiliates. This did not enable rapid business plan formulation and visualization of information that is useful for management‘ decision-making. It was also difficult for the accounting department alone to handle all of the data due to the enormous amount of processing required.
To speed up processing, visualize data, and save labor at the same time, the company has adopted the Anaplan platform as their technology for a new management accounting system. This has made it possible to automatically create a balance sheet (B/S), cash flow statement (C/F), and cash position table (C/P) simply by making a profit and loss statement (P/L).
Within the next few years, many of Panasonic Homes’ most experienced accounting staff will reach retirement age, and the personal business planning process that relies on the expertise of individual veteran staff members will eventually reach its limits. Panasonic Homes aims to transfer those processes and skills to the Anaplan system.
This implementation has successfully reduced the working time of accounting staff involved in business planning by 2,000 hours per year and has also increased the speed of the process. Because many employees are now able to carry out business activities while being aware of B/S, the company is beginning to see beneficial effects, such as the shrinking of slow-moving inventory.
The management system, which automatically creates B/S, C/F, and C/P when P/L is created during business planning, was the first step toward building a core management system. Panasonic Homes is currently deploying this setup for monthly forecasting, and by combining that with actual performance information, they are working on building a powerful management system that markedly accelerates the business management cycle.
By adopting Anaplan in this way, Panasonic Homes will be able to expand and promote Connected Planning and contribute to the overall optimization of management.
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