Transforming Management Controlling and Reporting

00:00:10Conad del Tirreno is one of the main cooperatives of the Conad system, a retailers consortium that is the Italian leader in the supermarket space and the second largest grocery chain in Italy. In particular, Conad has a retail turnover of 2.5 billion Euros and about 9,500 employees in the group.

00:00:35My department is in charge of the Management Controlling and Financial Planning and Analysis processes. Our main goal is to support our management team in their decision- making processes. To do this, we need to work with a great variety of data often coming from different sources and databases. AlsoThen, we need to blend and normalize those that information, as well as to input new data, to provide intuitive and timely reporting to our management.

00:01:11First of all, we needed a tool that was easy to use. Secondly, we wanted a single all-in-one tool. At the time, we had in place a very complex data management process: we were using spreadsheets to run simulations and consequently we had systems that were uploading data from several databases into Excel. On top of that we were using other products to manage reporting, because obviously Excel and PowerPoint were not suitable to present data to our management.

00:01:56We went through a software selection with a clear goal: choosing a single tool for all the phases of our process. A tool that is easy to use. A tool capable of making us fully independent.

00:02:12The applications we built, mainly concern my area of interest, which is Management Control and Planning. We started from the Budget of Shareholders (Shops) project, which was followed by the Shareholders (Shops) Balance Sheets Projection. We then developed the entire Management Control area, from the budget to the monthly balance for the whole group and for each of our 340 stores.

00:02:53On top of that, we built a financial dashboard that is updated daily. Every day, the top management can see on Board the debt situation, the balance of each current account, the rates data etc., etc. The Financial-Economic Planning is also a service we offer to each of our members in the sales network (shops), because – as a cooperative holding – we develop a 3- years consolidated plan calculating financial and Capex KPIs and simulating a number of multi-years scenarios.

00:03:39We are now developing several other projects concerning the economic and financial planning area, especially in the Financial Consolidation space. This is a very complex task, because we consolidate about 50 subsidiaries, including strategic units, real estate companies, holdings and all the legal entities that our sales network is comprised of.

00:04:01Another important improvement for the entire company is that unlike Excel sheets, Board is a structured environment, accessible to everybody where it is clear which are the existing procedures and algorithms and from where the data are taken from. In the past, data where contained in Excel sheets, which became a personal asset of the people who were daily working on them. In the following years, when we had to face staff turnover, we found ourselves in front of Excel sheets that were completely inaccessible with very complicated calculations that were impossible to be understood and properly rebuilt. Moving this world to Board meant that, we transformed any business information from a personal asset knowledge owned by a few people, into a shared company's asset.

00:05:00Rather than recommending Board to other companies, I invite them to come here and see for themselves what we achieved thanks to Board. This is something that several Conad cooperatives are already doing and as a result they have adopted Board in areas such as management control and sales amongst others. This was subsequent to our initiative, as after coming here and seeing what we have achieved, they realized the potential of this product and the advantages in using it.