TMD Friction Chooses Planful for More Effective Marketing Planning With Much Less Effort

TMD Friction manufactures premium brake friction products for the world’s biggest automotive brands for both original equipment and the aftermarket. Headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany, the company has over 20 facilities across four continents. That vast presence challenged marketing planning and budgeting across regions and subregions as frustrations mounted with its legacy solution. So, TMD Friction chose Planful to modernize, standardize, and improve its marketing performance management efforts.

Digital transformation drove TMD Friction to update processes, improve business ROI, and replace its existing system. When it was time to look at the tools used for sales and marketing, it was clear that its legacy system had to go.

“Our marketing expense management system looked like something from the 1990s,” recalled Alexandru Nechifor, digital transformation leader at TMD Friction. “It was difficult to work with; it didn’t have automation, and we had to match expenses against categories manually.”

Marketing leaders struggled to get real-time visibility into how their advertising and promotion budgets were being spent. This often led to delays in reporting, making it harder for leadership to get timely insights into marketing investments.

As Alexandru considered potential solutions, he knew it was also an excellent time to standardize the marketing team’s budgeting and expense management processes across its regional cost centers. Over the years, different marketers have set up cost centers and segments differently. That resulted in more manual work when teams had to consolidate or roll up marketing budgets for reports.

“Once we started looking at marketing expenses more carefully, we wanted to report on spend easily, with just a few clicks,” Alexandru added. “We wanted a better user experience and automation, so we started looking at other options.”

TMD Friction scanned the market for potential solutions and quickly narrowed its choices to Planful and another vendor.

“We wanted to standardize so we could understand how we were spending our marketing money,” said Alexandru. “We liked what we saw in the Planful demo and the support we got from the team. The Planful interface is also really simple and quite clean. It’s a well-thought-out tool for marketing teams, and it was half the cost of the other solution we considered.”

TMD Friction has a large footprint, but its marketing structure is straightforward, with about 35 cost centers. Each region is split into two subregions, each with an advertising and promotion budget for most marketing activities and a general budget for other items. Gaining standardization was its primary goal, but it also wanted a solution that was easy to use and cut down on manual work.

“We started with a blank slate, knowing what we were trying to achieve and our struggles with the old tool,” Alexandru said about the implementation. “Planful’s team gave us suggestions and advice on how other customers used it, which all helped.”

To streamline the rollout, Alexandru assembled four volunteers to work through the expense and category standardizations since they would be the users. About 40 marketers at TMD Friction now use Planful several times per week, and feedback has been “really good,” with teams giving it a 4.5 out of 5.0 ranking on a post-implementation internal team survey.

With Planful’s marketing solution deployed, TMD Friction moved its expense management and budgeting efforts to a modern, easy-to-use solution. Within a few months, the company ran its annual marketing planning in Planful.

“Our output is better with Planful,” said Alexandru. “It’s more organized, with more details, and you can extract the information you need much faster. It’s a great tool.”

Additional results from Alexandru’s internal survey showed that the team “strongly agrees” that Planful is an improvement over its legacy system. Half the team said it decreased their budgeting workload by up to 33%. Others reported budgeting effort reductions of up to 50% when using Planful.

“The marketing team definitely sees the improvement and appreciates that they don’t need to spend as much time on admin work,” Alexandru added. “At the end of the day, they’re marketing people. They want to be out in the field doing what they like, not to be an accountant or admin. That was a big win for us.”

Adding to the impact of Planful was the acquisition of TMD Friction in late 2023. As the new owners wanted to understand the budgets and ROIs across the company in depth, Alexandru and the marketing team used Planful to provide quick and detailed answers.

Alexandru stated: “We got really positive feedback from the new owners. They said we were the only department that actually knew, to the Euro, how we’re spending our budget. That was another big win. In the old system, we couldn’t have done it.”