Set up of budgeting and forecasting process for a leading Indian retail chain

• Budgeting and Forecasting process being performed in spreadsheets and multi dimensional modelling was a challenge to plan at a granular levels
• As all the regions data was managed in spreadsheets, consolidating the data and formatting to bring the data into a compatible format was a huge effort
• Product Hierarchy rolls down to SKU level and the combinations led to higher model size and performance issues
• Since the cost allocation happened at multiple levels [Group - Class - Category - Brand - SKU], distribution of the targets and reconciling with the targets was tedious
• Defectives and Trade Ins process were loss generating and it was difficult to understand the root cause, in optimizing the cost

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• Understood the budgeting and forecasting process and the stakeholders involved in the budgeting process and created a workflow mechanism to provide access only to the respective stakeholders who owns or contributes to the process
• Standardized templates has been prepared for all the uploads across the budgeting and forecasting process to feed the data into the system with minimal data formatting and transformations
• Predefined allocation proportions are calculated based on the historical and AOP trends and auto-populated to the planning process to reduce the manual effort and additional overrides provided wherever required
• Customized the Profit and Loss schedule of Defectives and Trade-In Process to eliminate the additional layer of complexities in the calculations and to provide the insight of the gains/loss generated for the period

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