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Groupe SEB Chooses BOARD For Smarter Finance Reporting

Announcement posted by BOARD International 17 Oct 2018

Sydney, 17 October 2018 - BOARD International, the #1 decision making platform for organisations of any size, has announced that Groupe SEB, owner of iconic homeware brands like Moulinex, Tefal, T-fal and Krups, has selected BOARD to power a suite of smart finance applications to manage its worldwide operations.
 
BOARD acts as “finance toolbox” where different components can be combined to create standalone application for finance and management reporting requirements. It is layered over Groupe SEB’s existing, decade-old management report system, but provides the flexibility demanded by executives, finance and other business functions to understand their performance.
 
“We wanted to start by bringing value to parts of our operations and then add more and more tools within this toolkit to create a snowball effect,” said Philippe Martelo, VP, Finance Information Systems Groupe SEB.
 
Groupe SEB has developed three standalone applications in BOARD to date. 
 
The first application seeks to consolidate 800 SAP BW reports into ten business intelligence environments. The project is ongoing as more and more reports are incorporated. A second application consolidates sales forecasts for Groupe SEB’s 150 subsidiaries worldwide. “The idea is that every week they provide us with a sales forecast for the current month, and for the 3-6 months to come,” Martelo said. This is consolidated into a group level sales forecast delivered via an iPad every Tuesday.
 
The third application, called ‘Strategic Orientations’, is considered internally to be the most promising, taking advantage of BOARD’s advanced calculation and simulation functionality. Strategic Orientations encapsulates Groupe SEB’s strategic planning process, providing profit and loss (P&L) planning for the next five years. It helps the business plan its product development and strategic marketing activities. “In the past, this strategic plan was managed in Excel with bits and pieces, with mistakes, with markets trying to change the OpEx of corporate or otherwise massaging the figures, so it was not efficient or reliable,” Martelo said.
 
Using Strategic Orientations, all parts of Groupe SEB can understand how decisions they make at a local or internal level roll up to the group’s P&L. “Each user can manage the tool as they wish. It can be top down, bottom up, by brand, product or geography. This is very smart and very much appreciated by all the users because we didn’t change the underlying processes. With this tool, we enabled them to work as they did in the past, albeit far more flexibly,” Martelo said.
 
In addition, because the application was developed using agile methodologies, it is being augmented iteratively. A recent update introduced a “sandbox” where different scenarios, such as changes to input figures, can be safely tested. 
 
Groupe SEB considers Strategic Orientations to represent the “heart” of BOARD’s capabilities. “It makes us very happy and is very promising for our next steps. It is giving us a lot of ideas to develop the next set of finance applications.”
 
“We are very excited to see what Groupe SEB has been able to achieve with BOARD to date,” said Mark Sands General Manager Asia Pacific, BOARD International. “We look forward to seeing how they are able to continue to push the boundaries of business reporting, and the impact that this has on their worldwide business development and success.”
 
About BOARD International:

BOARD is the #1 decision-making platform for organisations of any size. Founded in 1994, BOARD International has enabled more than 3000 companies worldwide to rapidly deploy Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management and Predictive Analytics applications on a single unified and programming-free platform. The BOARD platform allows companies to achieve a single, accurate and complete view of business information and a full control of performance across the entire organisation, from strategic formulation down to operational execution. Thanks to its programming-free toolkit approach, global enterprises such as H&M, KPMG, DHL, Mitsubishi, NEC, Puma, Siemens, Toyota have rapidly deployed end-to end decision-making applications in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions. Headquartered in Chiasso, Switzerland, and Boston, MA, BOARD International has 21 offices around the world and a global reseller network. BOARD has been implemented in over 100 countries. www.board.com
 
ENDS