Granite Construction has shaped the American landscape, from carving out roads for Yosemite National Park to assembling the California Aqueduct and helping to rebuild the World Trade Center’s PATH Transit Center. For over a century, a willingness to adopt new technologies and approaches to get the job done has won the company high-profile contracts and the respect of its peers.
But with growth—Granite oversees 3,500 construction jobs annually—came greater challenges that involved ensuring the accuracy of its financial planning and modeling. As a result, it became more difficult to maintain the company’s commitment to modernization and expansion—especially during a time of rising infrastructure needs.
“The previous planning system was struggling to handle the complexity of our operations,” says Abbie Aribas, head of financial planning and analysis at Granite. “Our ability to manage change suffered.”
Better financial coordination.
For years, Granite struggled to harmonize financial planning for its two segments—construction and materials. Models for each were managed in spreadsheets before being sent through a labor-intensive system that rolled up operational inputs. The process was disjointed and involved extensive manual entry. As a result, standard procedures such as quarterly financial forecasts became massive undertakings.
Granite leaders prioritized addressing those challenges. After reviewing options, leaders decided on Workday Adaptive Planning. Within a short time after deploying it, Granite leaders started seeing positive results.
“We coordinated both segments in a single system and for the first time produced unified budgets and forecasts,” Aribas says. “We went from 4 to 10 annual consolidated forecasts. Almost overnight, we were repositioned for agile planning.”
The level of detail we’re capturing has made forecasting more understandable.
Head of Financial Planning and Analysis
Profits and losses from the ground up
Factors such as supply chains and weather can change at any time. That means numerous adjustments are needed to keep plans aligned with a particular job.
“Bridging the gap between profits and losses or squaring budget versus actuals requires knowing what happens on any given work assignment,” Aribas says. “Previously, our data analysis didn’t allow for detailed insights. But since adopting Workday Adaptive Planning, the level of granularity we now capture has significantly improved our ability to comprehend and analyze variances.”
Granite can now drill down into the individual job level of projects to provide rich, timely insights into new work versus existing work. As a result, profit and loss forecasting across thousands of construction projects with unique ledgers is now coordinated in a single system.
From a budget versus actuals perspective, increased access to operational specifics improved Granite’s understanding of what factors most impacted project numbers. This enhanced insight enabled it to automate certain aspects of the process that cut board reporting from 10 days to 3. With Granite’s ability to hit completion benchmarks tightened, it could create flexible reporting schedules that better matched the on-the-ground conditions of its industry.
The roadmap for materials planning
Granite runs quarries and asphalt plants that produce high-quality materials to build roads, runways, and bridges. But given the scope of its operations and other companies’ demand for its products, Granite needed to connect each site to a unified financial planning system.
“We have over 100 materials plants, and before swapping systems, nothing lined up,” Aribas says. “Financial plans lived on spreadsheets requiring manual data entry with limited user access and little coordination for rolling up in the total-company ledger. Now, financial data for all facilities flows into a single system, which can be updated across all locations by 100 power users.”
Today, production costs, revenue and sales plans for all plants are brought together within a single solution that generates unified financials. These streamlined numbers give Granite a better understanding of each facility’s cost structure.
With a very user-friendly system, we made coordinated changes that better aligned our business across all levels.Head of Financial Planning and Analysis
A blueprint for progress
Even with a history of adaptation, Granite was impressed with the application’s results. The ease and speed of alignment to its operational needs soon chiseled away at any initial worries about whether the system could adapt to its size and scope.
In short order, Granite had both replaced outdated spreadsheet processes and reduced financial forecasting schedules from nine weeks to five.
“We’ve got a better blueprint for factoring in changes—and after a century of business, we understand how important that is,” Aribas says.
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