Sky is an entertainment and communications company, offering TV, Broadband, telephony, and mobile services to over 20 million people. As a large, complex business. Sky needs to plan and forecast its finances effectively, accurately and in real time.
How many spreadsheets is too many?
But their financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes relied on hundreds of spreadsheets, across many business units and six different geographies. Resulting in a significant amount of manual updating and process that was time consuming and meant having one, real time, version of the truth very difficult.
Sky needed a better way to do FP&A. Sky needed a tech solution to provide fast accurate reporting and forecasting across its growing complexity, while remaining flexible, scalable, and powerful.
Enter KPMG x Anaplan.
At KPMG, our people have a variety of experience in addressing complex client challenges like the one faced by Sky. Working together with Sky we were able to bring together our wealth of knowledge of client challenges and the variety of technology we offer to be able to define their vision and business case to implement the right solution, Anaplan.
Anaplan is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create and share dynamic forecasting models and dashboards. Its ability to handle large data volumes and complex calculations, coupled with seamless integrations with existing systems made it, an ideal solution for Sky’s challenge.
So how do you implement an organisational wide change, across six different countries, as well as bringing the variety of FP&A teams on the journey to the new state of operations?
I think where KPMG impressed me, impressed my team, was experience first and foremost. They'd done it with others, they succeeded with others.
Make the difference with technology
In phase one Anaplan has given Sky a single source of information for its FP&A data, metrics and KPI’s, retiring over 150 spreadsheets from the system. With a complete modernisation of their FP&A process from reporting to planning, it has significantly reduced administrative tasks for the finance team. Allowing them to invest their time in strategic, value adding work.
Looking to the future, KPMG will begin to build automation into Sky’s future forecasting models and processes, helping Sky to continually bring to life their ‘Believe in Better’ vision for the future.
This Sky programme shows that you can truly get from group, to market, to commercial based planning with a joined up technology that sets you up to grow.
