How Sky has transformed its financial planning

Sky is an entertainment and communications company that provides TV, broadband, telephone and mobile services to more than 20 million people in Europe. As a large, complex organisation, it is important for Sky to plan and forecast its finances effectively, accurately and in real time.

However, the processes for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) are based on hundreds of Excel spreadsheets spanning many business units and six regions. This previously resulted in a significant amount of manual updating and processes that were not only time consuming, but also made it difficult to get a single "version of the truth". Action was needed: the company needed a better way to perform financial planning and analysis and a technological approach that would enable fast and accurate reporting and forecasting.

KPMG employees have a lot of experience in dealing with complex customer challenges like the one Sky faced. Together with Sky, we developed a plan on how to bring together and utilise technology. At the end of this process was the implementation of our tool: Anaplan.

Anaplan is a cloud-based platform that enables dynamic forecasting models and dashboards to be created and shared. Its ability to handle large amounts of data and complex calculations, coupled with its seamless integration into existing systems, made it one of the best possible tools for Sky to master the tasks of financial planning.

How do you implement an organisation-wide change in six countries and involve several teams in the new operational process? The first phase involved establishing a single source of truth for FP&A data, metrics and KPIs. More than 150 spreadsheets were replaced. The modernisation of the FP&A process significantly reduced administrative tasks. The time this freed up allowed Sky employees to invest more time in strategic and value-adding work.

Our German Anaplan team was brought in to provide expertise in the technical implementation and development of the Anaplan solution. The KPMG team took on the central role of developer and contributed to the successful implementation. In addition, we ensured the efficient and structured implementation of the project using agile project methods. Our Anaplan experts worked closely with KPMG in the UK to design the software and process architecture to drive the transformation of Sky's financial planning and analysis processes