Contact Information: Media Contacts: Derek Kober GlobalFluency 650.433.4233 Greg Schneider Adaptive Planning 650.810.0525
Specsavers Group Enhances Visibility Into Financial Performance and Supports Rapid Growth With Open-Source Software From Adaptive Planning
Company Eliminates Hundreds of Spreadsheets, Centralizes Budgeting Process, and Enables Rolling Forecasts; Becomes Adaptive Planning's Largest European Customer
| Source: Adaptive Planning
LONDON--(Marketwire - August 10, 2009) - Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in on-demand
financial planning and reporting solutions for companies of all sizes,
today announced that the Specsavers Group has selected Adaptive Planning
software to optimize its budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.
As the UK's leading glasses provider, Specsavers is using Adaptive Planning
to dramatically improve the efficiency of its budgeting and forecasting
processes, enhance collaboration, and establish a financial planning
platform to support aggressive expansion. With this significant multi-year
agreement, which supports business users worldwide and includes joint
product development activities, Specsavers has become Adaptive Planning's
largest European customer.
With over 1370 retail locations in ten countries and a robust customer
website, Specsavers is the UK's leading retailer of glasses, contact
lenses, and digital hearing aids. As its business has rapidly expanded
throughout the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Specsavers needed a
more sophisticated and comprehensive solution that would eliminate the pain
and resources associated with an international planning process. Given the
dynamics of a growing company and an increasingly volatile economic
climate, the company sought a solution that also allowed them to perform
more collaborative rolling forecasts. The company's previous
spreadsheet-based processes took too long, were inaccurate, and resulted in
significant consolidation and version control challenges. Executives and
managers needed a better foundation for driving an international expansion.
"Our goals for a new budgeting and planning solution were to reduce the
amount of time required for budgeting, implement a rolling forecast
process, simplify the collection process across globally distributed
groups, and eliminate the considerable pains created by our proliferating
spreadsheets," said Andrew Mackay, Director of Reporting for Specsavers.
"Our IT department identified Adaptive Planning as an application that
offered advanced budgeting, planning and reporting capabilities. After
evaluating the product, we quickly realized that Adaptive Planning would be
an ideal solution for evolving our key financial processes."
Specsavers evaluated a number of budgeting and forecasting applications
before selecting Adaptive Planning. Specsavers' IT group selected Adaptive
Planning's open-source solution because it was consistent with their
strategy to employ applications that offer greater development flexibility
and integration with other mission-critical systems. The company's finance
organisation selected the solution for its ease of use, powerful business
process features, and price point that was significantly lower than
competitive solutions.
"Prior to implementing the Adaptive Planning solution, we were heavily
reliant on Excel for our budgeting and forecasting," said MacKay. "We had
to email spreadsheets to contributors across 10 international locations and
collect the data. As a result, it was an extremely time intensive,
error-prone and inflexible process that typically took us up to 4 months.
As we focused on global expansion, we knew there had to be a better
process."
With Adaptive Planning, Specsavers has been able to decrease budgeting
times and improve overall accuracy, and they will be able to enhance their
ability to plan for the future by implementing rolling forecasts. More
importantly, they have established a collaborative financial management
platform that will help drive better, more strategic business decisions
going forward.
Adaptive Planning provides powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use software
without the exorbitant costs or lengthy installations associated with
enterprise performance management packages. The solution is available both
as an on-demand service and as an on-premise application; deployments
average less than 3 weeks of consulting time; and business users require
under an hour of training. The company has over 450 customers worldwide.
About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in on-demand planning and
reporting solutions that streamline financial processes, strengthen
collaboration, and drive better-informed, more strategic business decisions
in companies of all sizes. Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond
spreadsheets and automate budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, without
the cost and complexity associated with traditional business intelligence
and BPM software. With free software, free trials, and both on-demand and
on-premise deployment options, Adaptive Planning provides the fastest and
easiest approach to streamline and elevate your financial management.
Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and can be
reached at 650-528-7500 or www.adaptiveplanning.com.