Stena Line’s move to dynamic planning

“Previously a lot of the budget was performed in Excel and was more simple accounting. One had to know much more about finances. It was a copy-and-paste system of volumes, sales, etc.,” says Group Business Controller Karin Jedvert.

When the pandemic hit, and the borders closed, Stena Line, lost a major amount of its earnings overnight. This sudden change required the company to rethink its strategy and planning approach. They chose a local implementation partner and had several requirements when seeking a new planning solution. Flexibility, agility, transparency, and user-friendliness were the main reasons they chose Anaplan.

“With Anaplan, our planning process has become more uniform. Everything is connected, and it’s more driver based. That’s a big win.”

Financial Controller, David Tåhlin

Initially, Bedford Consulting implemented Anaplan to perform forecast and budgeting processes within Stena Line’s various businesses and included a Budgeting/Forecast model and an extensive reporting suite. It’s been subsequently expanded with additional models to incorporate the entire financial planning horizon, from long-term strategic planning (5-10 years) to weekly operational decisions. The company now has a visual model of multiple activities, enabling them to determine where it can reduce costs.

“The transition from static planning in Excel to dynamic planning has created value in several ways in terms of agile and seamless planning processes, better internal communication, flexibility, and speed.”

The FP&A model has created the bridge between strategic and operational decision-making and allows end-users across the company to collaborate with their insights. Information is also continuously updated through daily user adjustments and hourly transactional loads.

“Connecting and streamlining the financial planning processes in Anaplan has provided increased transparency, facilitating cooperation across all parts of the company. The information is available to everyone, so they can develop and run their projects, which has saved us a lot of time. It’s given us more time to focus on what is essential”, Karin continues.

“We have monthly reporting of our actual figures, which is a large part of our existing capacity in the current system. And then there are our forecasts. Weekly forecasts provide a better overview of what is happening. This was not the case before Anaplan. And then, of course, we have the budget. We are also working on sustainability and a much better analysis package to produce our reports”, says CFO, Marica Derenstrand.

“Flexibility is becoming increasingly important in a constantly and rapidly changing society. We now have a very flexible solution that allows us to take this into account. This has enabled the teams to respond more swiftly to business needs when they arise. Our working methods are so flexible compared to before. It is so cool! Moving away from Excel has enabled us to support the business and react quickly”, says Karin.

Connecting the processes across all business activities empowers Stena Line to see early impacts such as:

• Changes to the number of freight units affecting F&B and Cabin revenue onboard the ships.
• Changes to the number of travel guests impacting onboard sales.

Connecting business activities, scenarios, and prognosis with operative planning provides many new opportunities.

• Stena Line uses Anaplan across all activities (travel, freight, etc.) and provide dedicated insights to answering business questions but also legal structure questions.
• Stena Line is a sustainability-focused company planning to invest in sustainable solutions. Using scenario planning, the company can predict how this investment will affect revenues. The company can also consider fluctuating energy prices, exchange rates, maintenance of vessels, emissions, and more through forecasts and scenarios by simply changing parameters and looking at data flow chains, creating the best conditions for sustainability planning.
• The long-term planning model is the latest addition and lets the company plan 5-10 years ahead. They can dynamically create scenarios to investigate different business questions, for example, predicting the cost of creating a new ferry route.

“Moving away from Excel has resulted in a much smoother planning process. We have a good dialogue with the users in the organisation. It feels like they are involved and take ownership, which is important.”

Financial Controller David Tåhlin