An American agricultural cooperative of growers, cultivating cranberries and grapefruit. It currently has over 700 member growers.

Manual Financial and Commercial Planning

There was a highly manual financial planning process and gap resolution tracking. They were prone to mistakes, labor intensive and lacked visibility of the assumptions behind the plan.

Opportunity

With o9, this customer was able to automate gap detection and enable an initiative driven approach to gap closure. Assumptions tracked against initiatives are actively managed based on changes in business climate. The system projects related impacts to the overall P&L, providing visibility and eliminating guess work.

Multi-Currency Scenario Planning

There was a lack of granularity in trying to include the effect of future factors impacting the financial forecast into the planning. A significant element here was the lack of multi-currency scenario planning.

Opportunity

With o9, this company was able to perform scenario planning with a high level of granularity. Furthermore, they now have the ability to consider key factors influencing the financial outlook such as business challenges, growth assumptions, and future effect rates. This has particularly helped to take on challenges regarding COVID-19 contribution margin.

Planning in Silos

There was a lack of visibility and collaboration between business functions, which led to planning in silos and a big delay to complete the annual operating plan.

Opportunity

With o9, the highly differentiated Enterprise Knowledge Graph was leveraged to integrate various planning functions across the organization, reducing overall E2E planning cycles and increasing visibility and efficiency.

Key Functionalities Implemented

The Enterprise Knowledge Graph is used to build commercial and financial planning models, including long-range planning, annual operating plans and a rolling 18 month forecast.

Systems Replaced

Hyperion Essbase and Excel.

Success Factors — 3 reasons why o9 was selected 

1. Excellent user experience of the platform allowing for high user adoption by the organization.
2. o9 being the future-proof platform with continuous innovation.
3. The ability to use o9’s open architecture to customize the solution to fit the organiz-ation’s needs.

KPI Impacted

1. Improved financial outlook to growers.
2. Reduced NPI cycle times.
3. Improved productivity.