Tim Schojohann discusses the traditional approach to budgeting and its limitations, including reliance on Excel, difficulty explaining deviations, and lack of insight. This makes it hard for senior management to justify budgets and leads to ad-hoc requests. Xeraphic aims to overcome these challenges by integrating data from various sources, providing a single source of truth, enabling common language on spending, and giving real-time management insight through automated consolidation and drill-down into cost items. At Deutsche Telekom, Xeraphic delivered soft savings through timely reallocation of unused funds and hard savings through reduced deviations and back-office effort.

1. Tim Schojohann
The Art of Budgeting

2. The Goal: Improving ROCE through Accurate Budgeting

3. The Traditional Approach to Budgeting
Individual Budgets in Excel
Clarifications/Updates
Clarifications/Updates

4. Business decisions must be made on basis of high level information
• High degree of ad-hoc requests needed to drill down
• Late identification of required tactical/strategic adjustments
• Generic cost saving programs rather than targeted
Strategic Impact of the Traditional Approach
Rejecting projects due to perceived budget limitations
• Actual project spend lower than forecasted so that funds remain blocked
• No time to plan how to spend surplus on revenue generating activities

5. Manual Forecasting Impacting Senior Management
Difficulty explaining deviations from budget plans
Hard to justify required budget for the following year
Lack of insight to answer executive questions leads to ad-hoc requests
 Data to answer ad-hoc requests generally spread across systems and individual
Excel files
 Ad-hoc requests take long time to answer and data can be out-dated once
communicated (e.g. “What do we currently spend on licenses?”)
FinanceView
Mgt.View

6. Controller manage Data instead of Costs
Budget deviations hard to identify timely as only visibility into accumulated costs
 Shadow bookkeeping deluding real numbers
 Project scope adjustments not reflected in budget allocations
 Financial view in data warehouse differs to project view, e.g. due to depreciation
Double accounting due to lack of visibility into movement of budget allocations
 Limited to consolidated view on budgets and spending, inability to move cost items
between individual projects and/or budgets
 Constantly clarifications required from Project Management
Slow and manual process to move data from Excel into the data warehouse
 Team of controllers consolidating Excel sheets
 Translating forecasts into data warehouse formats
 Error prone process due to manual interaction

7. Project Managers Work in Projects AND Corporate
Administrative burden on project managers
• Manual tracking and updates of budget plans
• Involvement in answering ad-hoc requests is imperative
• Additional decentralized PMO needed to cope with workload
Numbers and reports from Finance make no sense and lack granularity
• Finance seems to speak a different language as numbers don’t match
• Impossible to have meaningful discussions on budget allocations

8. • Integrate data from best-of-breed tools
• Enable common language on spending
• Proactive re-allocation of budgets
• Minimized reporting – Real time management insight
Xeraphic fills the Gaps between Departments and Systems

9. Overcome the Challenges of Excel
Human Error
File Version?
No History of
Adjustments
Correlations?
Before
No comments
Historic View
CollaborationCorrelations
Enter data once Reminders
Single Source of Truth
for Reliable Data
Integrity
Xeraphic

10. Automate the Consolidation of Budget Forecasts
“A lot of time and effort involved to consolidate information as well as to keep it updated”
Clarifications/Updates
Clarifications/Updates
Fully automated consolidation and aggregation
Clarifications via drill down into cost items
Before Xeraphic

11. Drilling down for Clarifications
??
???
? ??
Before Xeraphic
Centralized view on initiatives down to line items

12. • Cost Projections / Rolling Forecast
• Fast, accurate and fully automated data
processing
• Tracking Actuals vs. Plans
• Identifying and managing deviations
• On-going optimisation of Budget Allocation
Real Time Information on Plans, Costs and Forecasts

13. Understand Cost-Item-Dependencies when Cutting Costs
Before Xeraphic
Cutting costs might impact the organizations performance
Understand dependencies of cost items such as contractsUnderstand dependencies of cost items (e.g. contracts)

14. Customer Case: Deutsche Telekom
Soft savings
• Additional revenue through timely and proactive re-allocation of
unused funds into revenue generating projects
• Massive reduction of effort to manage monthly cost projections,
enabling rolling forecasts
• Improved cost transparency and confidence in numbers and planning
Hard savings (ROI > 300%)
• Less than 1/2 of unexpected deviations from budget plans
• Reduction of back-office effort by 60% (ROI)
• Reduction of decentralized PMO support requirements by 30% (ROI)
Improved process efficiency in Financial Planning and Budgeting by 400%

15. Answer the „Easy“ Questions Quickly, Finally
Built by experienced business leaders
to remove the challenges and artificial complexity they experienced themselves during
transformations
Next Generation Platform Technology
Developed in alignment with Fraunhofer Institute
Based on Gartner Requirements for Integrated Business Planning
Traditional systems are purpose-built for silos and think in different logics
CMO – Projects, HR – Cost Centers, SAP – GL etc.
Integrating data from best-of-breed tools, enabling various use cases

16. Low Risk with Great Flexibility
Flexible delivery: SaaS, On Premise, Hybrid
Build with international data protection complexity in mind, encryption down to
attribute level
Fast on-boarding: Initial Implementation during product validation
Focus on customer success and enablement instead of professional services
Multi-tenancy / -hierarchical, -organisational, -lingual,...
Multiple dependencies of same data enable further use cases
(e.g. service costing, vendor management)
Everything we do is focused on customer success
that is also how we measure our outputs
NPS

17. How is this relevant to you?
Call me: +48 604 694 159
Write me: Tim@Xeraphic.com
Tim Schojohann
Regional Sales Manager - Central Europe & Middle East
CRS | Managing Dynamic Businesses