With 4,000 employees and 150 locations, Trost is one of the leading car parts wholesalers in Europe. To keep it that way, Trost is expanding like hardly any other company in the industry. This makes it all the more important to keep an eye on key figures, markets and business potential. Above all, this requires sound business planning. It provides information on opportunities, risks and investment needs and thus the basis for targeted business development.

However, if the necessary information can only be entered and evaluated with difficulty, the willingness to deal with the topic of business planning on a regular basis decreases. In the worst case, the quality and reliability of the planning data suffers. Trost Team Leader Controlling Elmar Elze knows this too. In the past, the existing analysis and reporting tools from SAP Business Warehouse were only insufficiently used at Europe's leading parts dealer. "Long running and loading times of the web layouts, as well as poor user acceptance, made business planning difficult," Elze recalls. Trost was therefore looking for a way to make its planning processes more user-friendly and to speed them up.

Better performance and usability ensure more user acceptance

"Our goal was to simplify the planning process and at the same time improve the quality of the underlying data through higher user acceptance. With the help of IBsolution, we have undoubtedly succeeded," praises Elmar Elze. The basis for the improved business planning is IBsolution's modular software solution AGIMENDO. It complements the functionality of SAP Business Warehouse, integrates different sub-plans, can be operated intuitively and thus accelerates the processes noticeably.

"Whereas users used to have to switch back and forth between web layouts for different plans, the central entry point makes data entry much easier," praises the Controlling team leader. And this is independent of whether the information is to flow into the 3-year plan, the investment plan or the forecast. The individual sub-plans are automatically assigned to the selected cost centre, and the relevant period is simply stored in a parameter table. This ensures that planning can also be carried out independently of the current calendar or financial year. Default values for interest and receivables can be determined at the click of a mouse, and data, layouts or reports can be commented on quickly and easily. The export of the web layouts into an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF document is also done at the push of a button. "The acceptance of business planning has increased rapidly since the introduction of the new solution. This makes our business development immensely easier," Elze is pleased to say.

In addition to improved usability, performance and flexibility have also improved. "The running and loading times of the web layouts could be accelerated sustainably," says the team leader Controlling. Among other things, this is due to the fact that the queries have been consistently structured and thus much smaller amounts of data have to be processed in the consolidated cube. For this purpose, it was first necessary to harmonize all actual and reference data from different previous systems and consolidate them in a new data pot. "That was an enormous challenge," Elze recalls.

Master data maintenance by the specialist department

In addition, authorized employees from the department can now create and maintain master data themselves via the AGIMENDO.edit software. In the past, the IT department always had to be called in for this. Furthermore, different parameter tables, which are centrally maintained and automatically fed from different parts of the application, accelerate the planning process. Instead of determining nominal and percentage information with the help of cell references from the source systems, this information is read directly from the corresponding parameter tables.

The optimized business planning was implemented at Trost within only 12 weeks. "This is mainly thanks to IBsolution's specialized knowledge in the areas of business process optimization and business intelligence," Elze is convinced.