BNS GROUP OPTIMIZES ITS BUDGETING PROCESSES WITH ANAPLAN

BNS Group is among major Russian fashion distributors. The company carries over ten world-renowned apparel and accessories brands in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Over 20 years the company has successfully developed about 100 of its own retail stores. The BNS Group portfolio features such famous brands as Calvin Klein, MEXX, Michael Kors, Polo, Ralph Lauren, Coach, Karl Lagerfeld, etc. This shaped its corporate reputation of a progressive player at the domestic fashion retail market.

Previously the BNS Group's financial service run its budgeting on MS Excel and Prophix software. However, their processing speed failed to meet the demands of the rapidly developing company. This considerably restrained the financial service operations. BNS Group officers could not perform calculations on-line or simulate scenarios or bring changes into the current system.

Company's management has scrutinized the market of available solutions with the view to simplify the budgeting and to better detail the planning via fast processing of large data volumes. This determined the selection of the Anaplan platform as a perfect match to the high demands set by BNS Group. The platform is a proven leader among cloud solutions for financial planning and analysis according to The Gartner Magic Quadrant™ 2018 Report.

For the implementation, BNS Group chose to team up with KORUS Consulting as the two companies have a history of successful partner relations and the customer trusted the provider's deep expertise in automation of business processes through innovative solutions in retail chains. The customer had set up the corporate Anaplan Center of Excellence. Thus, the project was partly delivered in-house while integrator's experts got involved in training of business users and for solving of the most complex tasks.

With the platform implemented, BNS Group has completely abandoned MS Excel models previously used to accelerate its budgeting. In addition to less calculation errors in ever growing data volumes, it has streamlined an entire budget allocation process. The company was able to introduce extra report forms that were previously impossible due to the complex coding needed in the old system. Moreover, BNS Group is now capable of modeling various high granularity scenarios and reviews calculation outcomes in real time. This functionality is useful and convenient in annual budget campaigns.

System's flexibility plus customer's insights into its own business processes have propelled BNS Group through the implementation and eliminated the need to write technical documents and guidelines that are extensive and rapidly become outdated. Moreover, the competence of retailer's own staff is sufficient to modify company's business model and to run calculations in this new model without any assistance of external consultants.

'Retail is one of the most high-tech intensive businesses. Being among fashion retail leaders we are motivated to use and to develop efficient and reliable solutions. The system's prime task is in budgeting. However, we also employ it to calculate our merchandise which is an important success factor in this industry. We are grateful to the Korus Consulting team and appreciate their deep involvement in finding solutions to technical challenges of this project. We plan to further enhance the use of the Anaplan platform across more business process,' states Ruslan Shvedkov, BNS Group CFO.


'BNS Group's determination to be self-sustained in their system development has enabled the record short project delivery timeframe and – what is of critical importance – resulted in a high customer's satisfaction with the choice of platform and proved the platform's fit to the business needs. The use of best practices and technologies will assist the retailor in responding to new challenges and in its evolution in sync with the Russian retail market,' comments Vsevolod Teplyakov, Head of Business Planning in CPM Department at KORUS Consulting.