Groupe Pochet is a global leader in bottling for perfume and beauty products, transforming glass, plastic and metal for customer brands including L’Oréal’s Lancôme, LVMH’s Dior and Guerlain, Chanel and Estée Lauder. With 2019 sales of nearly €500 million, it employs over 4,500 people and runs 14 sites across three continents, plus nine ‘Made in France’ and six ‘Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant’ sites. Its embedded focus on corporate responsibility commits Pochet to ‘making luxury differently’.
Constant disruption continues to test the luxury industry. This presents new opportunities while driving the need for transformation. And change is happening faster than many companies can plan, budget and react. At Pochet, reliability, security and continuity deficiencies were additionally making reliance on multiple reporting tools, repositories and the heavy use of Excel a major driver of cost, risk and inefficiency. With manual processes in Excel, even the smallest changes required significant time and effort for often limited and sometimes irrelevant information. A lack of real-time data was forcing leaders to limit their expectations and restrict corrective actions.
This is why in recent years Pochet has been running an ambitious transformation programme, driving change in the Finance department, where it is essential to have a global overview of the group’s performance. Pochet selected Workday Adaptive Planning primarily to unify all financial systems across the Group and its various divisions to ensure data consistency – harmonising the production of secure, accurate and directly comparable financial information throughout the Group.
We wanted a solution that was flexible, collaborative and agile, and that allowed teams to take ownership of the group’s transformation issues.
Chief Financial Officer
Automatic integration of data.
By integrating all financial and sales data from Pochet’s four existing ERPs, the implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning has:
- Harmonised financial data and models across all divisions and subsidiaries, on sales data and by destination account – all with no need to draw on different technical teams
- Shortened deadlines for producing financial statements and freed up time for analysis
- Provided a unified, integrated and high-quality view of the business across subsidiaries, business streams, sites, continents and customers
- Strengthened and improved predictive data to support fast and accurate decision-making as a driving force for proposals and business development
- Enabled the creation of a consolidated income statement for all Group entities, providing an accurate and clear view of the business
New flexibility and accelerated budget cycles.
The first sales budget cycle was completed just six months after the project’s launch in September 2018, with the whole sales team participating. Since then, having Workday Adaptive Planning at the heart of the financial tool for budget preparation has enabled Pochet’s Finance team to halve the time involved.
This proved particularly valuable in 2020, when it was decided to shorten the budget cycle in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “It allowed us to have more information more quickly", says François Lardennois. This will also enable the 2021 budget to be highly flexible, allowing it to be used primarily as a monitoring tool and to enable forecasts to be adjusted for the second half of the year.
We will use Workday for simplified financial forecast modelling, weekly tracking of our consolidated cash position, tracking KPIs and payroll forecasting.
Chief Financial Officer
Streamlined consolidation of budgets and forecasts.
Gaining more rapid access to key data is enabling management to make decisions faster and with confidence, safe in the knowledge that the integrated, financial data is accurate and up-to-date. The solution has also introduced a range of new financial-management tools, streamlining the production of financial statements and freeing time to focus on strategic data analysis for improved decision-making. “This is making Finance a trusted strategic partner”, adds François Lardennois.
In addition, Workday Adaptive Planning has improved data-quality, shared skills and knowledge across the Group, pooling and optimising resources by creating models accessible to all business lines. It is now much easier to change the data repository or the scope of analysis for the Group and its activities.