Aurorium Uses Planful Predict AI To Increase Order and Sales Forecast Accuracy

Aurorium produces specialty ingredients and performance-enhancing materials that help global manufacturers deliver value-added solutions. As a global business thriving with organic expansion and frequent acquisitions, it grew frustrated with its opaque legacy financial analytics system. So, it turned to Planful for a more transparent monthly close and consolidation process and incorporated Planful Predict AI to improve sales forecasting and production planning.

Aurorium is based in the U.S. but operates globally, with manufacturing sites and offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. As the company grew to over 50 entities through acquisitions and financial necessity, it needed more and more trustworthy insights than its Oracle Essbase system could provide.

“The system was a black box,” said Robert Franz, Senior Reporting & Systems Analyst at Aurorium. “You couldn’t understand the numbers or how they got there. It created many questions, so we’d look at the source data and didn’t tie. Too much effort was spent just trying to determine how and why we got the results that we did.”

With Oracle Essbase also lacking even basic reporting functionality, Aurorium wanted a more purpose-built solution for its FP&A team to add data visibility, trust in the results, and less frustration when closing the books, forecasting sales, and reporting financial results.

In less than six months, and with the help of Bakerfield Solutions, Aurorium selected Planful and replaced the ill-suited Oracle Essbase legacy system. With it, Aurorium gained data transparency from simple, clickable drill-downs to quickly reveal source data and increase data trustworthiness. Planful delivered financial performance management capabilities that streamlined and enhanced its FP&A processes.

Robert continued: “Planful added a lot of data visibility, which increased trust in the data and our financial results. Since Planful is tied directly to our source data, we know exactly where the numbers come from. Even if the data is from a manual data load, we know exactly where it came from and can track it back to the actual data. Planful allowed us to build our financial processes around data integrity.

“We also got a lot of flexibility with Planful by being able to tag data with background or other information, as opposed to the prior system, which was clunky and forced extra workarounds. Everything is easily defined and very clear in Planful.”

On top of improved data integrity and enhanced FP&A processes, Aurorium uses the Planful Predict suite of AI and machine learning capabilities to understand anomalies in financial data at the consolidated and detailed levels. Predict further enables drill-downs to better investigate potential errors through to the account and business unit data, and provides different chart views to filter out the noise and focus on the critical data signals.

Aurorium now has over 30 corporate finance, business unit leaders, and local controllers using Planful, including the company’s CFO. Trust in financial data and deep finance functionality has increased decision speed, but the improved sales forecasts enabled with Planful Predict have been a real game changer for the company. For example, Predict: Signals identified anomalies in 89% of Aurorium’s GL combinations, indicating instances where actuals fell outside the expected range and calling attention or adjustment.

“We inherently trust the data in Planful and don’t question it anymore, and Planful makes acquisitions so much easier with the flexible attributes and easy management of hierarchies,” added Robert. “But, using Planful Predict has really helped us anticipate orders and better plan production volumes. When we’re deciding on production run volumes, Predict shows us which customers are due to place orders soon. That lets us run a bigger batch, which is more cost-effective, instead of multiple small batches, which would be more costly.”

Planful AI insights give FP&A more confidence when offering guidance and making decisions. That, in turn, builds trust with the business and deepens collaboration as they work together to achieve business goals.

Robert continued: “Our FP&A teams can go into their next meeting with Predict forecasts and say, ‘Go ahead and run a bigger batch because we’re expecting more orders.’ Then they can ask the salesperson, ‘Reach out to these specific customers to confirm they’re going to place orders in the next six weeks.’

“Our sales leaders see how these Predict insights help us make better business decisions. You don’t need to sell Planful to your business users; just let the data talk for itself.”

For those eager to put AI into action across finance, FP&A, and the business, Robert offers a few tips based on his experience with Planful Predict:

• Be curious. Dive into Predict to learn how it works. Using AI might sound daunting, but Planful makes it easy with visibility that lets you see the historical data and why an anomaly might be out of bounds.
• Start with a small report and data you understand well. Robert says: “Once you drill in, Planful Predict is very intuitive. You see the history chart, visualize why that number was called out, and then dig deeper or ignore it because you know the reasoning behind the signal.”
• Adjust Predict to suit your needs. It’s easy to tune Predict by adjusting its levers to focus on specific years of data or changing the signal sensitivity. You can also adjust the data levers to focus on accounts, sub-accounts, or months to tweak the signals further.
• Move on to bigger reports. As you gain familiarity with Predict, you’ll understand how the signals are generated based on your adjustments to the levers. That will give you the confidence to adjust the levers and sensitivities when viewing bigger reports.