Orion Uses Planful To Cut Days from Monthly Planning, Drive Better Financial Insight, and Help Guide Business Growth

Orion Group Holdings (Orion), based in Houston, Texas, is a leading specialty construction company serving the infrastructure, industrial, and building sectors across the US, Canada, and the Caribbean Basin. It provides marine construction and dredging, turnkey concrete construction, and other related services.

Orion runs a large and growing business, overseeing a large portfolio of projects — some with budgets reaching nearly half a billion dollars. With significant amounts of transformation and growth on the horizon, the company can’t afford to let manual processes and a lack of timely information impede crucial decisions or limit scalability. That’s why Orion chose Planful to replace spreadsheet-driven budgeting, planning, and analysis workflows with Planful’s integrated, automated, and AI-enabled financial performance management platform.

Nearly every company puts spreadsheets to work across its business. Orion is no different, yet it was quickly outgrowing its ability to forecast, plan, and analyze financial data effectively. Worse yet, manual processes and massive spreadsheets created planning bottlenecks that eroded agility.

“Orion has a fairly complex forecasting, planning, and consolidation process,” explained Barrett Gilley, Orion’s VP, Finance. “We have a fantastic team that is very good at using Excel and running complex processes, but it creates a single point of failure. It’s also hard to manage volatility, make new scenarios, and change assumptions quickly.

“Excel is a great tool. But it’s not super scalable.”

Barrett had deployed and used Planful successfully in a prior role, and was impressed with its capabilities and the value it brought to his prior organization. He knew firsthand that a modern, integrated approach to financial performance management delivers robust analytics, efficiency-driving automation, and decision-making speed — all capabilities Orion needed to continue its strong growth trajectory.

With an RFP at the ready and an extra emphasis on ease of platform administration, Barrett set out to evaluate available solutions and put Orion on solid financial performance management footing.

This wasn’t Barrett’s first software RFP, and he has created a “very robust” process with numerous key criteria. After running multiple vendors through multiple rounds of elimination and placing high priority on end-to-end usability, it was easy to make a final decision.

“Planful really set itself apart because it’s very user-friendly to configure and administer,” said Barrett. “During the demonstration phase of the evaluation, I would ask vendors how to set up a new user, create a new dimension, alter a hierarchy, or create a calculated field. It seemed like some hadn’t answered those questions before, as if they were used to presenting to executives who weren’t actual users of the tools. They just wanted to show me a dashboard.”

Planful stood out in many more critical ways for Orion, from out-of-the-box data integrations and Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365 to Planful for Workforce Planning and Planful AI. With Structured Planning and Dynamic Planning, its finance team had broad capabilities to support the company’s continued scalability and speed.

“Orion has a very unique business model,” Barrett added. “Planful lets us leverage external source models, transactional databases, and multidimensional cube models. We can integrate transactional backlogs and prospects from Salesforce into a plan. That’s crucial in the construction world.”

Modernizing its planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes provides Orion with more insights into its business, enabling faster and more agile decision-making. One area where Planful’s speed delivers tangible results is in its monthly planning process.

“We used to send spreadsheets back and forth via email to gather data, and it could take as many as five days to gather data,” Barrett explained. “Planful integrates with our upstream ERP and CRM systems almost in real-time. We’ve been able to cut days from our process and looking to accelerate even more in the future. We’re doing this monthly, so that’s a lot of time. And, we’re bringing data to our executive leadership faster, which drives more value.”

Beyond saving time and resources, Barrett points to Planful’s ease of use when it comes to onboarding new team members as Orion scales. Given the company’s complexity, it took as many as six or nine months to bring new analysts up to speed. With Planful, Barrett now expects that to be reduced to “a couple of months.”

Additional benefits Planful delivers to Orion include:

• Eliminating the single point of failure created by massive, fragile spreadsheets. “Before Planful, we had very complex spreadsheets that one person owned. If someone new came in, they would probably break very quickly.”
• Augmenting teams with Planful AI. “You might not have enough people to look at every possible data intersection. Planful AI analyzes the trends and identifies the areas where you need those human brains to focus.”
• Improve workforce planning data security with Planful for Workforce. “Workforce data is sensitive, which adds bottlenecks. Planful lets us delegate workforce planning tasks in a way that increases security without compromising efficiency.”
• Building reports in Excel with Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365. “Excel isn’t going anywhere because standard reports can’t answer every question. When combined with Planful Spotlight, we can extract and integrate data easily into ad hoc Excel models—I use it all the time.”
  
• Bringing structure to financial performance management processes. “Planful organizes the data so it’s documented, very clear, and we can understand what we’ve done. It’s a lot easier than plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and hoping someone adds a comment.”
• Easing volatility and complexity with speed and automation. “Planful enables us to do complex, project-level variance analysis faster and easier than before. These and the other insights we’re getting out of Planful make us very agile, so we can respond to what’s happening in the business very quickly.”
• Gaining a finance-owned platform. “Administration is one area I don’t think people focus on enough. When you can configure the tool yourself, you can constantly improve without spending money or waiting too long. Planful can be almost fully administered by anyone who’s an Excel power user.”

In addition to those many benefits, Barrett also highlighted how Planful helps him participate more effectively in Orion’s financial processes.

“Planful lets me get into the weeds in a lot more detail than I could in the past,” he said. “That makes me more powerful as a leader because now I have the time to really help my team.”