Sto SE & Co. KGaA - Automation of extrapolation - Sto gets fit for the future

Automation in extrapolation makes Sto SE & Co KGaA fit for the future

About Sto SE & Co. KGaA

Challenge in the project

The parent company and subsidiaries of the Sto Group work closely together. At the same time, the individual
business units operate largely independently on the market. In controlling, this results in a great need for coordination and manual effort in reporting.
Following the successful harmonisation of internal and external monthly reporting at the Group level in recent years, the next step was to initially supplement the triple projection of the
Group with a monthly rolling projection and then replace it with this. The aim was to minimise the need for coordination between parent company and subsidiaries and the high manual and time-consuming effort as well as to be able to constantly forecast the development with
the monthly rolling forecast of the consolidated income statement in order to be able to react promptly to trend deviations.

Solution

The further development of the consolidation system and the reporting system required the conception
and implementation of new technical requirements. With the use of predictive controlling - the automated extrapolation - it is now possible for the responsible department to create monthly consolidated forecasts at group level largely automatically. The monthly financial statements of all individual companies are read into the forecasting system, the rolling extrapolation is created for each business unit in its local currency and transferred to the group consolidation system SEM-BCS, where all measures relevant to the financial statements are then carried out on a monthly basis in order to efficiently integrate the reporting occasion into the monthly reporting.

The convincing project result is a clearly structured process of monthly consolidation -
including extensive automation to reduce sources of error and reconciliation activities, whereby
the regular reporting runs smoothly and uniformly.

Result achieved

With the introduction of automated projection (predictive controlling), the Sto Group can now benefit from a clearly structured process of monthly consolidation. The density of information has been massively increased and the manual workload has been greatly minimised, while at the same time increasing the accuracy of forecasts. The automated extrapolation not only freed up valuable resources for other tasks, it also greatly minimised the susceptibility to errors and created more effective control options through the accelerated uniform reporting. Simple and uniform forecast data is now made available to all corporate units.

The forecast by algorithms can be generated in a matter of seconds for all locations or individual companies - on a monthly basis! The automatically generated forecast values can be read into planning solutions or group consolidation solutions for further processing and simulation in the future. In future, Sto will be able to react to fluctuations in the key earnings figures in a forward-looking and timely manner.

Technologies

• SAP SEM-BCS
• SAP BW
• SAP BW Integrated Planning
• R - for the preparation of the forecasts