Overview

pGroupon (a href="http://www.groupon.com"www.groupon.com/a) (NASDAQ: GRPN) is an experiences marketplace that brings people more ways to get the most out of their city or wherever they may be. By enabling real-time mobile commerce across local businesses, live events and travel destinations, Groupon helps people find and discover experiences––big and small, new and familiar––that make for a full, fun and rewarding life. Groupon helps local businesses grow and strengthen customer relationships––resulting in strong, vibrant communities. To learn more about Groupon’s community-building efforts, please visit community.groupon.com./p

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

pGroupon is a fast-paced company with evolving priorities to meet the needs of its customers and merchants. Our financial processes were manual, lacked real-time data and weren’t standardized across the business. We relied on fragmented tools and spreadsheets that were prone to human error and often left the door open for data to be misinterpreted. These inefficient financial processes made it difficult for us to keep up with the rapid cycle times our business model required and hindered our ability to adapt./p

The Solution

pA lack of real-time data and reliance on manual spreadsheets made it difficult for our finance team to turn around quick changes, which ultimately slowed our cycle times. We needed to reimagine our manual financial processes in order to drive strategic efficiencies that could be easily scaled across a growing, global company, and determined Anaplan was the best solution. The cloud-native platform could automatically and seamlessly consolidate Groupon’s real-time data in a single, unified environment and was easy to implement and manage within finance. We deployed Anaplan in 2013 for financial consolidations and today we have over 20 use cases across global finance teams and more than 150 Anaplan users across the company./p

The results

pOur 20+ use cases in the Anaplan environment have been instrumental in driving productivity and agility at scale at Groupon./p pAnaplan enabled us to cut down mundane tasks, drive substantial time-savings and make our financial consolidation, forecasting and modeling processes more intelligent, agile and accurate. Instead of spending their time on data collection, our finance team can model, analyze and deliver valuable insights related to key financial documents and outlooks, such as Groupon’s income statement, Capex plans and balance sheet, to help Groupon’s CFO optimize the business./p pAnaplan’s scalability and intuitive User Experience allows us to standardize our processes, removing often complex barriers to planning and enabling our use cases to grow and evolve with the business. Now our teams can move easily between projects, work with relevant data across devices, and quickly adapt models to reflect real-time change./p pThe power of Anaplan to apply automation and standardization to a fast-moving company like Groupon has been incredible, especially as we navigate complex market change and disruption.  /p

Metrics

pPrior to Anaplan it was difficult for Groupon’s finance team to turn around quick changes and projections. Information lived in disparate, offline spreadsheets, hindering our team’s ability to create agile, precise forecasts and reports. With Anaplan we’ve been able to bring the processes and workstreams that are imperative to our operational success into a single cloud-based environment. We’ve standardized our forecast modeling and established a single source of truth for Groupon’s global leaders to leverage as they make complex business decisions, driving both agility and productivity at scale. After launching our innovative Master Data Management model, we went from about 10 disconnected processes — which involved manual email steps, error-prone system updates, and a missing validation step that caused extra work across our global teams — to a single source-of-truth in an Anaplan model. The model automates both the requests and validation of all key financial data lists, saving up to 15 hours per month across our global teams. With our revenue and gross profit planning model, we went from about 12 disconnected and manual spreadsheets across our global finance teams to one Anaplan model that automates the manual tasks previously completed by each individual team member. Anaplan standardizes the forecast methodology and key metrics to measure business progress and eliminates up to 15 hours per month of manual work across the teams./p

The Technology

pAnaplan’s cloud-native platform helps orchestrate business performance by connecting critical operational drivers and financial outcomes to drive agility and efficiency. Anaplan gives decision-makers line of sight into every corner of the business to ensure operations are aligned with financial priorities. Teams across functions work from a single source of truth to access real-time insights, model scenarios continuously, and forecast with increased accuracy to optimize performance./p

Disruptive Factor

pWhile Anaplan drove automation and flexibility across our global financial processes, Groupon data, including workforce and vendor information, still lived in disparate systems and offline files that required tedious data input and analysis from siloed teams across the organization. As we continued to grow as a company, aligning our financial data across our key systems was critical to optimizing processes throughout the company./p pWe developed an innovative Master Data Management model in Anaplan that integrates our people, finance and vendor data from individual systems in a single source of truth. Now we leverage one unified view of critical company-wide data, which allows us to further automate our business and align siloed departments to drive more strategic planning and forecasting./p pWhen key financial list data is updated, for instance, that data is produced once in our Master Data Management model and reflected within our unique systems. In addition, we have a validation process managed directly in the model that highlights any systems that are out of sync with the master source. This alignment of master Groupon data helps ensure that decisions made across functions are collaborative and tie back to Groupon’s financial source of truth./p

Shining Moment

pGroupon’s strategic Center of Excellence has been a game changer for user enablement as the Anaplan environment continues to grow. The COE team allows Groupon to apply resources in the best possible way, ensures projects are aligned with company strategy, develops and maintains standards for Anaplan models, and runs a customized enablement program that trains model builders at Groupon. The COE enables Groupon’s Anaplan users and over half of its 150+ Anaplan users are power users./p