Business challenge With multiple BWG Foods depots sending goods to stores across its network, the company found that budgeting and sales reporting processes had become increasingly complex. How could it streamline these processes? Transformation Working with IBM Business Partner ProStrategy, BWG Foods upgraded the technology supporting its analytics activities with IBM® Planning Analytics— delivering faster, simpler, more accurate reports. Business benefits: “Thanks to IBM Planning BWG Foods Analytics, we have saved Frees up 240 more than 240 hours on hours of analysts’ time, Simplifies and streamlines the budgeting process and enabling them to focus on over eight hours a week on value-add tasks group-level reporting sales reporting.” Tim O’Leary to drive business growth MIS Manager Eliminates BWG Foods dependency on individuals with detailed application BWG Foods UC is part of BWG Group, a leading retail and wholesale distribution knowledge company operating in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. BWG owns and operates a number of leading retail brands with over 1,400 SPAR, EUROSPAR, MACE, Londis and XL stores serving local communities in Automates partnership with independent retailers. BWG also owns and operates leading weekly and monthly sales Irish wholesale brands BWG Foodservice and Value Centre Cash & Carry. BWG analytics, accelerating Group has an estimated 12% share of the overall grocery retail market in Ireland, insight and a 40% share of the convenience retailing market. Share this Building a comprehensive view of sales performance When you run a network of multi-symbol convenience stores, keeping track of the sales performance of each store and generating accurate annual budgets can become difficult as the business grows. Without a convenient way to analyze financial data, you risk overlooking valuable insight that could drive strategic decision-making. BWG Foods, one of Ireland’s leading food retail and wholesale companies, operates a variety of convenience stores in Ireland and South West England, including Londis, MACE, SPAR and EUROSPAR. As the company introduced more stores into its group through acquisition, its finance “To gain an accurate picture of the BWG Foods found that the analytics Lorton Sherlock, Senior Management department faced additional pressure to performance of each store and generate solution it used to support its budgeting Accountant at BWG Foods, adds: produce timely, ultra-granular budgets reliable budgets, we need to distinguish and sales reporting activities no longer “Because our existing analytics solution and sales reports. the different types of sales made by each delivered the flexibility and performance was heavily customized to our needs, I store and convenience brand. As we required to deliver fast, reliable information was the only member of the finance team Tim O’Leary, MIS Manager at BWG introduced new brands into our group, to key decision-makers. who was really comfortable with adapting, Foods, explains: “Each entity in our this became increasingly complex and fixing and updating it. We wanted a network not only sells food, wines, spirits, time consuming.” Tim O’Leary continues: “Because our solution that would mitigate the risk of and other fast-moving consumer goods existing analytics solution offered limited relying on key individuals.” [FMCGs] direct to customers—they automation capabilities, we often had to “We wanted a solution that would also buy goods from multiple channels, work late into the night during our annual such as our cash and carry network and mitigate the risk of relying on key budgeting cycle. A significant proportion national distribution center. individuals.” of this time would often be spent completing tasks that had the potential Lorton Sherlock, Senior Management Accountant, BWG Foods to be automated, such as profiling overheads and calendarizing budgets.” 2 “Thanks to IBM Planning Analytics, we have been able to significantly streamline our reporting and budgeting processes and gain a highly detailed view of the performance of each of our convenience brands and individual stores.” Tim O’Leary, MIS Manager, BWG Foods Taking a new Impressed with a presentation delivered “Having used IBM Cognos solutions with With help from experts at ProStrategy, by ProStrategy, BWG Foods decided to positive results for some years, we were BWG Foods integrated the IBM solution approach implement IBM Planning Analytics on confident that IBM Planning Analytics with the company’s third-party finance premises to underpin company-wide could help us enhance the performance and analytics system, automating the Working with IBM Business Partner budgeting and reporting. and reliability of our analytics function.” extraction, transfer and loading (ETL) of ProStrategy, BWG Foods set out to data between these systems. evolve its analytics capabilities by Tim O’Leary continues: “We evaluated Lorton Sherlock adds: “Compared upgrading from IBM Cognos® TM1® to a number of offerings from different to our previous reporting tool, IBM “ProStrategy offered excellent IBM Planning Analytics—accelerating its vendors. IBM Planning Analytics stood Planning Analytics offers a more modern, guidance and support throughout the budgeting processes. out because it offered an out-of-the- accessible user interface. Because the implementation of IBM Planning Analytics box solution that would be fairly easy to solution is much easier to use and more and helped us get the solution up and implement in a short time-frame. flexible in terms of building models, we running in under four months. The rapid also knew that we wouldn’t need to make implementation was especially key for technical changes to the system when we us, as a recent acquisition had brought needed to update something.” our annual financial close deadline forward by three months, so we needed to implement the solution during our busiest budgeting period.” 3 Streamlined, The smart automation features of the By equipping business users at IBM solution enable BWG Foods to BWG Foods with a much more user- Solution components simplified achieve many of these time savings. friendly interface, the company has • IBM® Planning Analytics budgeting and For example, the company saves a also reduced risk and strengthened significant amount of time because its business continuity planning. The reporting IBM Planning Analytics automatically and Planning Analytics system is more Take the next step instantly calendarizes its overheads—a structured than the company’s old IBM Analytics offers one of the world’s deepest and broadest analytics platform, domain and With IBM Planning Analytics underpinning process that previously took up to a system, guiding users through a step- industry solutions that deliver new value to all financial performance management couple of weeks for each budgeting cycle. by-step process to complete each businesses, governments and individuals. For more information about how IBM Analytics activities, BWG Foods has accelerated Equally, automating the ETL processes workflow—so much less specialist helps to transform industries and professions the budgeting process, eliminated its between Planning Analytics and the knowledge is required. with data, visit ibm.com/analytics. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMAnalytics, on our blog at dependency on key individuals, and company’s other finance and reporting ibmbigdatahub.com and join the conversation automated the generation of key reports. systems has significantly reduced Tim O’Leary concludes: “Thanks to #IBMAnalytics. workload for the finance team. IBM Planning Analytics, we have been View more client stories or “With our previous system it would able to significantly streamline our learn more about IBM Analytics take us weeks to complete a budgeting Lenton Sherlock adds: “Not only can reporting and budgeting processes ProStrategy has built up over 30 years of cycle, but now we can complete this we generate budgets and sales reports and gain a highly detailed view of the knowledge and expertise in data and analytics process in just a matter of days—and much faster, we have also seen a great performance of each of our convenience technology. The company approaches each data and analytics project through a without needing to work evenings and improvement in accuracy. We have brands and individual stores. With this holistic view of its clients’ data capture and weekends,” says Tim O’Leary. “Thanks never needed to send out corrections ability to deliver accurate, detailed and management. ProStrategy is recognized as a data and analytics industry leader in Ireland to IBM Planning Analytics, we have saved for a report since we started using timely reports, we can empower key and has a team of over 50 highly skilled IT and more than 240 hours on the budgeting Planning Analytics.” decision-makers at BWG Foods to business professionals helping customers process and over eight hours a week on build fact-driven business development deliver the information that drives business performance success. sales reporting. This has made life much strategies to support future growth.” easier for our budgeting and reporting Connect with us team and frees up more time for us to focus on optimizing our reports. © Copyright IBM Corporation 2018. 1 New Orchard Road, Armonk, New York 10504-1722 United States. Produced in the United States of America, December 2018. IBM, the IBM logo, Cognos, TM1 and ibm.com are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions