The finance team at multimodal transportation enterprise RATP Dev knows something about growth and complexity. Serving more than 1.5 billion passengers each year in 14 countries across 4 continents, RATP Dev operates in some of the world’s most dense transportation networks. For the finance team, this translated into laborious forecast and budget processes using manual spreadsheets across distributed teams, which resulted in a lack of buy-in across leadership and operations. The company needed a better way to manage its growth and complexity. With the help of partner CohnReznick, RATP Dev turned to Workday Adaptive Planning to streamline budgeting and forecasting, increase report accuracy and improve organisational alignment with KPIs.
Workday Adaptive Planning has given us the ability to spend more time analysing and planning, rather than keeping track of spreadsheets and versions, and where updates were made and how they were made.
Controller
Challenges.
Time-consuming budgeting and forecasting. Twice yearly forecasts took four weeks to complete.
Unmanageable growth. Manual spreadsheets couldn’t keep up with company growth and made it difficult to consolidate and roll up entities.
Error-prone reporting. Managing an increasingly complex organisation using only spreadsheets made ad hoc reporting and what-if scenario planning inefficient and error-prone.
- Lack of alignment. Using spreadsheets to capture essential nonfinancial data was nearly impossible, creating a lack of alignment behind KPIs.
Results.
Streamlined budgeting and forecasting. Time spent forecasting has decreased 50 percent.
Strategic growth. RATP Dev adapted to growth strategically and managed the hierarchy changes stemming from that growth.
Improved reporting. The finance team now creates accurate ad hoc reports and what-if scenarios efficiently, which have greatly increased companywide agility.
- KPI alignment. RATP Dev operational managers, executives and finance leaders are now aligned behind nonfinancial as well as financial KPIs and are able to track data like safety, on-time performance, and so on.
The reception within the business in the field, especially because we’re really a remote-driven company, has been tremendous. So I think that‘s just an endorsement to what I’ll call the ease of use.
Controller