The U.S. auto industry represents some of the world’s most remarkable innovations and iconic business leaders. Fierce competition, economic boom and bust cycles, and rapid technological advances are par for the course. Just ask Fletcher Jones—a group of automotive dealerships across the country. With almost 2000 employees and more than $2 billion in revenue, Fletcher Jones weathered economic fluctuations and other challenges that left others in the industry behind. To continue to stay competitive, however, they knew they needed a better way for finance to report, analyze, monitor, and model the business.
With the help of Workday Adaptive Planning, Fletcher Jones has the platform and processes they need to remain competitive in the face of a rapidly changing industry. Now, finance has the insights and modeling capabilities they need to support strategic decision-making throughout the company.
We're using Workday Adaptive Planning in many ways at Fletcher Jones, not just financial reporting and not just through our controllers at our stores, but to engage our general managers and to get them involved in the culture of planning.
Chief Financial Officer
Challenges.
- Inefficient, manual processes. Finance spent so much time maintaining and updating spreadsheets, little time remained to extract insights and develop models to help guide company strategy.
- Lack of confidence in the numbers. With data coming in from multiple sources that didn’t always line up, it was difficult for people to trust the numbers.
- Siloed, disconnected planning. People outside of finance were disconnected from organization-wide planning and disengaged from reporting processes.
- Limited KPIs. Existing tools made it cumbersome and time-consuming to develop robust KPIs that incorporated non-financial as well as financial metrics, making it difficult to monitor throughout the year.
Results.
- Efficient, automated processes. Now that many of the monthly, quarterly finance tasks are automated, finance has more time to offer strategic insights, not just generate reports and reconcile spreadsheets.
- Single source of truth. With a single source of truth, stakeholders throughout the company have confidence in the numbers.
- Connected, collaborative planning. Ownership of the numbers resides with the people running the business and everyone at all levels participates in planning.
- Comprehensive KPIs. Fletcher Jones uses the Business Planning Cloud to blend financial and operational data and create KPIs that are easily monitored and analyzed.