An Iconic Luxury Brand Chooses Beyond Plans for Its Financial Transformation with Anaplan
With the support of Beyond Plans, a world-renowned French luxury brand has leveraged unique expertise to transform its financial processes. This comprehensive project enabled the company to transition from manual, siloed management to connected, agile, and strategic planning. From retail sales forecasting to entity P&L simulation, cash flow management, and profitability analysis for new store openings, the initiatives undertaken have significantly enhanced the company’s financial performance while providing better visibility and greater responsiveness to market changes.
Recognized for its excellence in ready-to-wear, leather goods, footwear, and accessories, this globally renowned luxury player partnered with Beyond Plans, an exclusive and certified Anaplan integration partner, for its deep industry expertise and thorough knowledge of the solution. Together, they successfully executed successive projects focused on financial planning and optimization.
Consolidated Margin Forecasting
This project aimed to better identify and measure value creation within the company. It focused on inter-company purchasing flows and improved inventory management to provide a consolidated view of internal purchases and accurately evaluate consolidated margin forecasts.
The solution enables the company to gain a holistic view of its performance by integrating not only traditional financial indicators but also cost-related and intra-company purchasing management elements. As a result, internal financial flows have been optimized, and stock management has been significantly improved.
Profitability Analysis for Store Openings
The company continued its collaboration with Beyond Plans to develop a solution aimed at improving the profitability analysis of store-related projects, such as new openings, relocations, and expansions. With dozens of such initiatives taking place annually on a global scale, each region needed to generate precise financial simulations aligned with the company’s strategic objectives.
Before implementing Anaplan, these analyses were conducted in Excel—a slow process prone to errors and missing data. Beyond Plans developed a robust solution capable of centralizing financial and operational data, standardizing data collection and analysis methodologies, and providing a clear vision of future performance.
This solution enables the assessment of short- and long-term financial impacts, including multi-year P&L projections, cash flow analyses, and strategic indicator calculations such as Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Payback Period, and Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). These features allow for project benchmarking, more informed decision-making, and more effective resource allocation.
Beyond Plans played a key role in integrating these indicators and customizing the solution to meet the specific needs of financial and operational teams. This close collaboration resulted in a solution aligned with strategic priorities while ensuring smooth adoption by users—ultimately leading to a lasting improvement in decision-making processes.
Optimizing Cash Flow Forecasting
Managing cash flows is a critical challenge for a luxury brand, where sales cycles, inventory investments, and inter-company financial flows require increased visibility.
Before implementing Anaplan, the company’s headquarters relied on manual forecasting methods, often using Excel files, which led to discrepancies between strategic expectations and regional reporting.
For this company, Beyond Plans implemented a tailored model to enhance cash flow management. By centralizing P&L and balance sheet data from HFM and configuring management rules to recalculate cash flow variations, the corporate consolidation team was able to compare two cash flow views (imported vs. calculated) to challenge regional forecasts.
This Anaplan model has strengthened collaboration between financial teams: the consolidation team now holds regional teams accountable for their cash flow assumptions, while regional teams benefit from a powerful tool to justify potential discrepancies. This alignment has significantly improved the reliability of financial information shared both internally and externally.
Beyond Plans: Anaplan Partner for Luxury Companies
The collaboration between this luxury brand and Beyond Plans highlights the value of Anaplan’s solution for the luxury sector when implemented by an industry expert.
- Enhanced Visibility: Anaplan centralizes data and provides a consolidated view of key financial indicators, improving the quality and accuracy of available information.
- Agility and Responsiveness: Financial models can be updated in real time, allowing for rapid adaptation to market changes.
- Detailed and Strategic Analysis: The projects undertaken have improved P&L analysis, cash flow management, and value creation measurement, providing a solid foundation for strategic decision-making.
By leveraging Anaplan’s capabilities and Beyond Plans’ expertise, this luxury house has successfully modernized its financial management, positioning itself for greater efficiency and long-term growth.
