Standing still or even moving slowly is not an option for IFM Investors. The firm has a responsibility to its 15 million-plus members to improve their retirement outcomes, and its rapid growth supports this commitment. Workday Adaptive Planning helps finance maintain the pace and deliver on an increasingly strategic mandate. The company has reduced reporting time from days to hours and increased forecast frequency from twice-yearly to monthly.
Workday Adaptive Planning has also reduced the complexity of managing multiple cost centres and currencies; IFM is able to run reports in nine currencies as opposed to reporting everything in Australian dollars. This flexibility is key for a growing multinational business with offices in London, Zurich, Berlin, Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo in addition to Sydney and Melbourne.
Connecting Workday Adaptive Planning to IFM’s NetSuite ERP has further increased the efficiency and granularity of reporting and given the finance team more time for strategic business planning. “We’re able to provide the senior leadership team more timely, relevant and forward-looking information to help them make decisions. This includes a better understanding of variances between forecasts and revenue, and the impact of those on the future”, says Philip Dowman, CFO at IFM Investors.
The next step for finance is to leverage these insights further to engage the business and keep IFM moving forward.
Workday Adaptive Planning gives us a faster, more effective way to get information out to the business even as the firm increases in size and complexity. It helps us provide value beyond just the numbers.
CFO
Challenges.
A rapidly expanding and complex business made planning and forecasting difficult; the business needed more detailed reporting to understand variances between revenue and forecasts and the impact on the future
Spreadsheet-based reporting consumed too much time versus the value provided and simply wasn’t scalable. Finance needed an easier and more flexible tool for planning and reporting
Finance also needed to increase the speed of reporting, as it took nearly an entire month to finalise reports on the month prior using Excel; the team spent too much time reporting on the past and not enough time looking forward
Results.
By integrating Workday Adaptive Planning with NetSuite ERP, the finance team has increased the speed of collecting and validating data; it’s able to spend more time on strategy and deliver more timely and relevant information to the business
Finance is able to support the rapidly growing business with more detailed reporting in nine currencies. It has also increased the frequency of forecasts from 2x yearly to monthly
Reports are more dynamic with finance using OfficeConnect to create visual reports at the click of a button