Cash News
Corporate budgeting for the new financial year used to be a frustrating process for Ms Justina Sim. As Singapore’s country head for logistics start-up Ninja Van, it was an essential – but painful – annual exercise.
Prior to her current role, Ms Sim was the regional head of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) for Ninja Van Group. Her team was tasked with manually entering vast amounts of financial data into spreadsheets, a time-consuming process that often led to errors.
This problem worsened in recent years as the company rapidly scaled.
It became clear that an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) tool would help with complex, multi-dimensional planning and analysis. It will also empower Ms Sim’s team to move the business forward.
Ninja Van is not alone in this struggle. In fact, more businesses are replacing their spreadsheet-based approach with an EPM software to monitor, measure and adjust performance across all their business units.
To meet these needs, Ninja Van turned to Workday Adaptive Planning, a cloud-based EPM platform that enables human resource (HR) and finance teams to seamlessly share data and collaborate. Workday Adaptive Planning enables companies of all sizes to become more flexible and responsive to keep pace with today’s ever-evolving business environment.
This becomes especially beneficial as companies scale and expand into regional markets. At that size, headquarters now need to consolidate financial plans and data across departments and communicate among diverse teams.
This complexity requires robust systems to maintain accurate and efficient financial management, says Mr Vince Randall, vice-president of adaptive planning, APAC at Workday.
Uncovering actionable insights
For organisations to make more informed budgeting decisions, they need a full financial picture of their business. However, this is difficult when important data is fragmented across various spreadsheets and siloed IT systems.
Ninja Van faced this hurdle as they expanded across the region. Ms Sim’s team struggled to get a uniform view of the business’ financial health, amid the array of methods regional teams used to plan budgets and forecasts.
“Aggregating, reconciling and reporting on data became time-consuming and prone to error. This limits the depth of the analysis the FP&A team could perform,” says Ms Sim.
“In addition, having the information in the right format is crucial. When you’re trying to do regional consolidation, you require a certain template.”