The FA scores financial planning goals

Achieving streamlined financial planning

The Football Association is an organisation as the name suggests, mainly synonymous with football, but goes far beyond just football. Housed inside the revamped Wembley Stadium, the FA hosts everything from concerts to sporting occasions and other events that require world-class facilities.

Alongside Wembley Stadium, the FA also takes ownership of St Georges Park based in Burton On Trent, home to the National Football Centre, educating the future generations of coaches at all levels of the game, alongside a leading sports medicine and research centre.

Paying the penalty (of Excel spreadsheets)

For an organisation as complex and wide-ranging as The FA, the ability to produce consolidated reporting across the group and split by division and segmented levels was the goal. Specific drivers of performance that require a technical understanding of underlying processes meant an off-the-shelf solution was never going to be suitable. Naturally, there was a heavy reliance on Microsoft Excel, and for remote teams using Google Sheets, there was always a disconnect between the format, methodology, and ultimately the output of any forecasting or reporting activities.

With a huge organisation-wide systems transformation already underway, it was the natural time for the finance team to implement a solution that would align to the new world way of thinking, whilst providing an opportunity to build in specific forecasting methodology into the system.

It’s good to have goals – evolving and improving the world

Within a build time of months, compared to years for conventional EPM implementations, the FP&A team at the FA, led by John Williams Group (FP&A Manager), the team was successfully utilising their Anaplan model to collate budget submissions, create consolidated reporting, and modelling out the functional areas.

John Williams (FP&A Group Manager)

The goal was the remove the reliance on Excel, and bring everyone together into one ecosystem, where planning and reporting went hand in hand. This meant that obtaining a forward-looking view of the business with a comprehensive set of numbers cut by various segments would empower senior management to lead with clarity like never before. The Anaplan platform helped manage investments in the business by giving more granular control and review over the investment budgets. By modelling out scenarios for different options and in real-time seeing the impact on the top like results and KPIs, the teams were better able to positively influence financial performance.

When data reliability and transparency became the 12th player

Data issues such as whether we can consistently rely, trust and reconcile data across systems is a common problem within the Enterprise Planning Software space and in complex organisations provides even larger challenges when multiple systems come into play. The FA with its myriad of teams, departments, divisions and sub-divisions, all with their unique data requirements meant that the existing ecosystem had a huge array of reliance and interdependencies, such as to finance, sales, and operations systems. This meant the task of bringing together and reconciling data points was difficult, a manual process undertaken every month end. John added “Historically we had relied a huge amount on Excel reporting – consolidating multiple tabs, files and versions across the different business units. The reporting was unreliable and not connected. There were also lots of issues with version control, lack of consistency and data management.” The Anaplan platform with its built in API connectors as standard allowed the implementation team to automate the data feed from various systems into Anaplan with relative ease when compared to other systems and solutions. A key part of that process is the ability to run and automate processes – a chain of actions that can extract, transform, validate and load the data, with built mechanisms in place to flag and reject any non-compliant data.

Expanding the fan base

With Connected Planning a core concept for Anaplan’s global vision, it was natural that upon learning of the development within finance of an automated planning tool that was cloud-based and automated data links with other models in the Anaplan ecosystem that people would want to know more. John said; “We’ve already spoken about using Anaplan within our events business – particularly looking at the forecasting of event day workforce (stewarding, policing, security, and catering staff). We also think the forecasting of our Team Camp activity will be a future addition to the model.”

INDUSTRIES
Consumer Goods & Retail

SOLUTION

• Financial Reporting
• Revenue Modelling
• Cost Modelling
• Staff Management
• Group Reporting

Read more about the use of Anaplan on our customer stories page.