1. Success Story: Poolside Planning with PoolCorp
Industry: Wholesale Distributor
Solution: Hyperion Planning Implementation / Enterprise Upgrade
CLIENT SITUATION
Pool Corporation is the largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool and
related backyard products. Founded in 1993, PoolCorp now conducts operations
through 298 sales centers in North America and Europe. The Company offers
more than 160,000 national brand and private label products to roughly 80,000
wholesale customers around the world. These products include a
comprehensive selection of pool equipment, a complete line of chemicals and
replacement parts, as well as a full array of irrigation and landscape products.
PoolCorp consists of a dynamic group of over 3,200 professionals worldwide,
who are all dedicated to delivering the best value to their customers.
PoolCorp found themselves in need of building a new planning and financial
reporting solution utilizing Hyperion Planning for the 2012 fiscal budgeting cycle.
The new solution would replace their existing Pillar and home-grown Excel
intensive application. The key objective was to provide an efficient platform that
would enable a timelier, more accurate and streamlined planning and reporting
process; reduce manual efforts; and enhance the overall user experience in the
plan creation, reporting, and analysis process.
SOLUTION
US-Analytics dove head-first into the deep end with the PoolCorp project team to
develop a Planning application for revenue and expense budgeting and reporting
for 30 users. Business rules and calculation scripts, which leverage both
Essbase and Planning form variables to simplify and reduce maintenance, were
created with respect to allocations, bonus distribution, currency conversion,
2. eliminations, freight-in, freight-out, income tax, payroll accrual, and purchase
discounts. Specific accounts were created to provide visibility and to shorten the
validation process, along with the addition of Dynamic accounts to provide
reporting of non-financial data. The existing Enterprise application was
leveraged for both the account dimension and entity dimension, which enables
metadata consistency in reporting for abbreviated maintenance.
In the past, PoolCorp had difficulty reconciling and tracking changes from one
version of the Plan to the next on a daily basis. By utilizing the audit functionality
of Planning, a change control report was created which enables detailed
reporting of modifications to data. The application was also designed to provide
for the recalculation of spread (monthly percentage of a yearly value) when an
update for the latest estimate occurs, which in the past, was a long, and tedious
process, highly prone to human error. End-users now have the flexibility to run
either standardized reports from the Web, or create their own reports with either
the Essbase Add-In, or SmartView, utilizing the familiar Microsoft Office program,
Excel.
In addition, US-Analytics created two FDM applications to load data into
Planning. One utilizes an extract from the current Enterprise application to load
Actuals and head count; the other loads the approximate five hundred
spreadsheet templates distributed to operations. Utilizing a relational database,
the spreadsheets are combined by division to facilitate approximately 15 loads,
instead of the previous 500. The solution also enables the loading of one
spreadsheet at a time, in the event a template is revised after the initial FDM
integration to Planning. Leveraging FDM was instrumental in simplifying the
Planning data load for PoolCorp personnel.
3. RESULT
Due to the large number of accounts which were based on net sales
percentages, updating the latest estimate in the past was an arduous process,
which left plenty of room for human error. This was further complicated by the
cyclical nature of the pool industry, and the importance of maintaining sales and
cost curves from month-to-month within the planned data. US-Analytic’s
implementation of Planning’s calculation scripts now allow PoolCorp to quickly,
and most importantly, easily update the latest estimate, make changes to growth
and margin improvement percentages, and maintain consistent curves that make
sense for their business. US-Analytics met and exceeded the business
requirements by bringing the project in ahead of schedule and under budget,
while going above and beyond to assure PoolCorp’s future business
requirements operate swimmingly.
