Major Petrochemical Manufacturer Saves Days Per Close Cycle With Planful PAMS

Since adopting Planful Admin Managed Services (PAMS), a dedicated expert service that handles day-to-day system administration and maintenance, the FP&A team has:

• Protected continuity through team turnover, keeping FP&A processes running smoothly without pulling finance away from strategic work.
• Freed up finance capacity by delegating repetitive, procedure-driven tasks, shifting team focus toward higher-value analysis.
• Improved performance in a mature, global environment through a PAMS-led streamlining of outdated scenarios and aligning configurations to current needs.
• Gained confidence and reduced operational risk, validating that complex, inherited processes are executed correctly each period.
• Established a dedicated expert partner, providing ongoing system stewardship, best practices, and responsive support.

Since 2020, a leading petrochemical manufacturer has relied on Planful to power finance across a global footprint of 500 to 600 users, spanning plants, regional offices, and manufacturing facilities.

The Corporate FP&A team manages budgeting, forecasting, monthly close, and ad hoc reporting within Planful, while a dedicated consolidations team manages intercompany activity. Nearly 100 budget owners across the business enter data directly into Planful, increasingly through data load rules (DLRs) rather than templates to streamline input.

At that scale, institutional knowledge is crucial. When the FP&A team experienced significant turnover within less than a year, the incoming team inherited a globally deployed Planful environment supporting hundreds of users, without the context behind how processes had evolved.

“The whole team kind of 100% turned over,” the FP&A Manager said. “We had to come in and figure out how Planful was being used… we’re still refining and learning how things are set up.”

For a finance team responsible for global operations, multiple modules, and nearly a hundred budget contributors, rebuilding that context while continuing to run budgeting, forecasting, and close was a significant undertaking that required the right support.

With significant team turnover, the team needed more context on the complex system without the institutional knowledge behind it.

As the new FP&A leader worked to regain context and confidence, they began engaging more closely with their Planful account team to address questions and process refinement opportunities. Through conversations, PAMS emerged as a natural next step.

PAMS provided the company access to a dedicated Planful expert who could provide continuity, analyze the system end-to-end, surface hidden dependencies the team could not immediately see, and take on repeatable administrative work. In doing so, PAMS allowed finance to stay focused on higher-value analysis and strategic planning.

“That’s the biggest selling point, the comfort level that things are being done properly,” the Finance Analyst and System Administrator said.

• System visibility and performance optimization: PAMS conducted a comprehensive review of the Planful environment, mapping connections and dependencies that were not immediately visible to the FP&A team. By identifying legacy scenarios that could be safely archived or removed, the team improved overall system performance and responsiveness, a difference in performance that users quickly noticed.
• Budget process and template maintenance: When the team ran a modified budget process for the first time, requiring prior year budget data to be spread across months for select product lines, PAMS handled the technical template updates.”That probably saved us approximately a day and a half of work,” the finance analyst and system administrator estimated.
• Monthly close support: Repetitive, procedure-based tasks during the monthly close cycle, including balance sheet true-ups that follow consistent steps each period, are now delegated to PAMS, allowing the FP&A team to concentrate on analysis rather than execution.”The tedious activities that don’t change every month, where there are procedures that can be referenced, those are the things we’ve passed on to them to free up our time to do more value-added activities,” the FP&A Manager said.
• Process review and validation: Beyond task execution, PAMS provided a second set of expert eyes on existing procedures, identifying opportunities for improvement and confirming that complex processes were functioning as intended. This ongoing validation strengthened operational confidence across the team.
• Responsive, embedded partnership: The PAMS team provides quick meeting recaps, clear action items, and consistent follow-through on every engagement. That responsiveness has created a trusted extension of the finance team, one that understands the environment and supports both stability and continuous improvement.

Today, Planful remains the operational backbone of finance across the organization. With support from PAMS, the team continues to rely on the following capabilities at enterprise scale:

• Planning module: Drives budgeting, forecasting, monthly reporting, and ad hoc analysis across hundreds of users worldwide.
• Automatic eliminations: Intercompany transactions that once required manual workarounds now run automatically, improving efficiency and reducing risk during consolidation cycles.
• Spotlight for Microsoft 365: Connects Planful data directly to Excel for on-demand reporting without manual data handling while preserving a controlled source of truth.
• Consolidations module: A separate team manages intercompany consolidations across the company’s many entities and global operations.

Since adopting PAMS, the team has:

• Saved a day and a half on a complex template maintenance project
• Freed up half a day every monthly close cycle
• Shifted that time toward analysis and strategic planning instead of procedure execution

Beyond measurable time savings, the team now operates with greater confidence in the stability and integrity of its planning environment. With repeatable tasks delegated and processes validated, finance can focus less on execution and more on insight.

For organizations implementing Planful and considering adding PAMS, the team’s advice is clear. “If you’re implementing Planful, I would recommend considering PAMS from the beginning,” the system administrator said. “They would have been there from the start, understanding the system as it was built. And that would have been an advantage.”

The FP&A manager summed it up, saying, “It all starts when you have reliable, stable information. Now we can think forward instead of just reporting what happened.”