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deFacto Global Case Study Sports Apparel Industry Leader

Staying Competitive In The Sports Apparel Business Requires Exceptional Performance | deFacto Planning Delivers The Win

deFacto Global Case Study Sports Apparel Industry Leader

Overview

To bring their budgeting and forecasting performance up to speed, this Sports Apparel Leader teamed up with deFacto Global to streamline their data, enhance their analytic capabilities and make their budgeting process effortless.

Challenges

  • Underperforming planning infrastructure
  • Outdated and inefficient planning system

Results

  • Establish a common chart of accounts to load data.
  • Use workflow to manage budget and rolling forecast submissions.
  • Automatically calculate revenue-related expenses for budgets and forecasts.
  • Run trial balance reports for all companies in a fraction of the time.
  • Evaluate dashboards to understand the health of the business

Maintaining a legacy of bold design in the sports apparel industry is no easy feat. With a fast-paced market in constant motion, staying true to your core values while, developing innovative products to meet customer demands and expectations, is quite a challenge on its own.  Staying on top requires a high-functioning planning infrastructure, and having an antiquated and inflexible budgeting and analytic solution can limit your capabilities, bog down your growth, and cost you the game. An underperforming planning infrastructure was one of the challenges that our client, an iconic leader in the sports apparel and footwear industry, was facing when their CFO contacted deFacto Global. The firm’s lifestyle brand team takes pride in creating breakthrough, innovative designs that are as bold as their wearers, and they are a company that deeply understands the relationship between style and performance—values that have been ingrained in their heritage from its humble beginnings.   

Planning Impediments

 Unlike the design and production aspects of their business, their budgeting and forecasting performance was lagging behind.  The planning system that the Finance team was working with had serious limitations and the solution was not scalable to the degree needed. The company’s international reporting and budgeting requirements were in constant flux and templates could not be updated to meet the changing needs. This resulted in cumbersome and time-consuming workarounds to generate budgeting reports that were required by their corporate parent.

In addition, they wanted to move to a rolling forecasting process, but the planning system’s constraints made this impossible. These limitations cost them valuable time and reduced their ability to analyze the health of their business. 

The company recognized the need to replace their underperforming planning solution with one that could help them evaluate the market and company data to stay ahead of the curve and remain an innovator in their industry. After evaluating a number of available Corporate Planning solutions, the company chose deFacto Planning to replace their Hyperion system.

Why deFacto Planning?

Coordinated with an implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D 365 F&O), their deFacto Planning solution was built to support financial reporting, currency translation, consolidation, budgeting, and forecasting. The combination of deFacto Planning and D365 F&O enabled the company to meet their goal of streamlining their data flow from an ERP system to a reporting and analysis system, to enhance their analytic capabilities, and make budgeting an effortless process through the use of simple input templates. By implementing D365 F&O and deFacto Planning, the company was able to:   

  • Establish a common chart of accounts to load data generated from D365 F&O 
  • Use workflow to manage budget and rolling forecast submissions from all department managers 
  • Automatically calculate revenue-related expenses for budgets and forecasts, like freight and royalties, minimizing data entry 
  • Analyze variances to actuals against forecast and budget, and by reviewing comments submitted with budget and forecast data, clearly understand the reason for the variances 
  • Run trial balance reports for all companies in a fraction of the time, compared to their old system, and make this available for all department managers to run 
  • Evaluate dashboards to understand the health of the business, product line by product line

Dramatic Turnaround

Since upgrading to D365 F&O and implementing deFacto Planning as their budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and analytics solution, the changes and benefits accrued have been dramatic.   

Using deFacto Planning’s dynamic input templates for their budgeting and forecasting cycle has enabled the planning team to budget for five years rather than being limited to just one year as they previously had been. Reporting is quicker and easier and they are pleased with the level of self-service that deFacto Planning has provided.   Before deploying deFacto Planning, they were able to forecast only once a year. They now can forecast on virtually any basis, even throughout the day, which has enabled them to glean the insights needed to excel in the prevailing market. With this new efficiency and potential, maintaining their goals and values as a company, in a constantly changing market, propels them ahead of their competition and secures their place as the leader in their industry.

deFacto Global Case Study Sports Apparel Industry Leader

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