Omnico Group Forecasts Now Ride the Company’s Roller Coaster of Change

Supporting seven of the world’s top 11 theme parks is a tall order. It’s essential to be able to quickly react to change with accurate, agile planning and forecasting. That’s why Omnico Group, the leading software provider for retail, food, and ticketing in the hospitality industry, switched to Workday Adaptive Planning. The company had outgrown the capabilities of Excel and needed a change. “When I joined, there wasn’t time for the value-added stuff. It was all about just consolidating data accurately and trying to produce basic reports,” says Tom Siviter, U.K. financial controller, Omnico Group. With spreadsheets and processes that weren’t scaling as the business grew, frustration mounted and accuracy suffered. It was clear that Omnico needed to make a change. It needed a more flexible model that would allow the finance team to automate data collection and free them up to spend more time on analysis. Then, delivering deeper insights and becoming a better business partner to the entire company would be possible.

Once Omnico adopted Workday Adaptive Planning, things changed for the better. The finance team is now able to build complex models and dashboards with the click of a button. When business partners request a change or what-if scenario, the finance team can pivot quickly to respond within minutes. Looking at revenue modeling to analyze the trends that are influencing revenue—something that wasn’t possible with multiple Excel spreadsheets—is now a collaborative activity that happens live during meetings as questions pop up. Business leaders can even self-service to quickly gather their own data with the simple interface. This all means there is more time for the finance team to focus on strategy rather than data validation. “Now, rather than just being there to provide numbers, I can talk to the board about the changes happening, go back to my desk, and 10 minutes later have a new report for them,” says Siviter. “It means I can actually make the decisions with them and be a proper business partner as opposed to someone hearing their requests and thinking how long it will take me to get through complex Excel processes to provide what they need.”

Challenges

• An enormous Excel group revenue file with all of the sales deals, sales stages, and revenue required manual cutting and pasting of all the actuals, which took an exorbitant number of days each month
• The limits of Excel made it impossible to analyze the trends influencing balance and cash flow, which siloed members of the finance team as number crunchers rather than allowing them to be strategic business partners
• Static planning meant no active management of the forecast, no ability to identify gaps in the forecast or determine risks in the numbers, and no way to do rolling forecasting—all of the finance team’s time was spent pulling data and producing basic reports
• Trying to create a forecast system meant the finance team was consolidating information from different data points only to have the data change continually, making it inaccurate almost as soon as it was input

Results

• With active planning, the finance team has become a more agile and strategic business partner, allowing them to plan continuously using data from across the business
• A rolling forecasting and reporting process now drives more strategic, forward-looking business decisions that can scale as the company grows
• Scenario planning allows the finance team to break down revenue into specific orders and determine whether it’s recurring, renewal, or a sales commitment, making a huge impact on the ability to focus the sales team’s awareness of what they need to do to hit their numbers
• Self-service reporting allows business leaders to easily find and use data within minutes to create their own reports