Eureden boosts the efficiency of its budgeting process with Anaplan and VISEO

Created from the merger of Daucy and Triskalia, Eureden is France's third-largest multi-purpose agri-food cooperative group. The Breton agricultural cooperative offers its members a solid platform comprising 50 production sites and over 200 stores, run on a daily basis by a team of 8,500 employees. Today, 18,500 farmer-co-operators place their trust in Eureden, which generates annual sales of 3.1 billion euros.

“Our agriculture division had no budget preparation tool, explains Murielle Brossard, Business Analyst - Group Financial Steering, Eureden. Our teams worked mainly with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets documents, which were extremely time-consuming to collect and consolidate. This could also lead to problems of data reliability, especially as our agriculture division covers a wide range of businesses with different management needs.”

Anaplan and VISEO: a dual response

Prior to the merger of the two groups, the Anaplan solution had been successfully deployed in the Daucy group's agriculture division. "We had already acquired a certain expertise in the Anaplan solution. It enables us to improve the budget preparation process by facilitating the feedback of information from different subsidiaries, to automate the consolidation of budgets, to homogenize and rationalize processes between entities, and to gain in efficiency, reliability and time. We decided that this was the type of tool we wanted for Eureden's agriculture division.”

Anaplan had proposed two integrators for this project, including VISEO, which was preferred by Eureden. "We had worked with VISEO at the beginning of 2021 on a project concerning our 'green distribution' branch, and we were satisfied with what had been achieved then. We therefore decided to continue with VISEO, which was able to draw on its knowledge of the Group's accounting repositories and tools to save us time on our Anaplan project."

A solution co-built with VISEO teams

“The diversity of our businesses means that not everyone builds their budget in the same way, notes Murielle Brossard. One of Anaplan's strengths is the ability to build models that correspond to each business need. We decided to create our models from scratch, in collaboration with the VISEO teams. To this end, 4 Eureden employees were selected and trained to the first level of model builder. This enabled these key users to fully understand the possibilities offered by the tool, what they could and couldn't achieve, and - above all - to get on board and immerse themselves in the project right from the start."

The models were built jointly by Eureden's junior model builders and VISEO's seasoned model builders, who were able to share the know-how they had acquired on previous projects. Each business line was examined individually, in order to take into account their specificities, while ensuring that a common income statement was proposed, in order to guarantee the consistency of the consolidation at branch level.

In order to effectively involve the teams in the project, the solution was also built in agile mode. "This enabled us to show the solution to end-users as it was being built. It's a very flexible development model, allowing us to take user feedback into account as we go along."

The project began with workshops in november 2021, with the aim of launching the solution in march 2022, in time for the preparation of the 2022-2023 budget. However, the implementation of the solution was postponed by a few months due to a cyber-attack, with the last batches deployed at the end of 2022. The Eureden and VISEO teams are now concentrating on extending the solution to certain sectors of the agricultural branch not yet covered.

New Anaplan projects... always with VISEO!

Eureden's objectives have been achieved with a more efficient budgeting process for its agriculture division, while respecting the specific needs of each business line. Automated data transfer and consolidation optimization mean that the agriculture division's budget consolidation process can be completed in a matter of days, compared with three weeks previously. The company now has a much clearer vision of its budgetary structure, both cross-functional and by company.

Another key objective of the project has been achieved: the ability for business teams to maintain their models autonomously, without calling on the IT department. “I've become a level 2 model builder and I'm beginning to accumulate a fair amount of experience in using this tool, explains Murielle Brossard. I've been able to adapt and evolve models on my own, and even run a complete Anaplan project. This expertise allows us to develop the solution according to our needs and schedule, without outside help. That's one of the strengths of the Anaplan solution”

Anaplan plays a key role in Eureden's IS transformation program. The solution is now one of the group's tools for budget planning and S&OP. Anaplan projects are likely to multiply in the future. "We recently launched a scoping study with VISEO, with a view to using Anaplan for group management reporting. A solution that will be able to cover all Eureden branches," concludes Murielle Brossard.