Lafarge: Cement activity management with Oracle Hyperion Planning

Lafarge is one of the construction materials leaders. The group counts 63,000 collaborators in 61 countries for a €12.843 billion turnover. In April 2014, Lafarge annunces its merger with the Holcim group to create a group at the forefront of the constructions materials.

Further to a management evolution of the groupe, which emphazies the geographical approch, Lafarge has launched a redesign of its cement activity management and budget preparation system, with the following objectives:

• Enhancing the vision by country
• Simplifying the model
• Ensuring the tools sustainability
• Proposing capacities of simulation and automatic spreading of dashboards

With a functional and technical project team, Nell’Armonia has executed Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Business Intelligence solutions, providing a P&L based on KPIs, sophisticated variance calculations, consolidation by stage Countries-Regions-Group and a budget construction based on inductors.

After a framing on the whole of scope, and in order to rapidly deliver concret results, Nell’Armonia and Lafarge have adopted an agil methodology, allowing concret deliveries in several stages to users, and thus paralleling the delivery of a lot with the analysis and the achievement of the following lots.

Futhermore, in order to facilitate change management and to accompany business teams using Excel, Smartview (Excel interface of Hyperion Planning), it is the unique work interface for all the tasks (data collection, results analysis …).

Finally, a stress test in life-size has enabled to validate the good load holding responsible of the application before to be put into production.

• Lafarge has been able to start its new reporting and forecast solution as planned, with a rocker on the new system without “parallel run” and a respected reporting scedule.
• The realized satisfaction survey following the launch has shown a high users accession to the new solution, both in central and in countries.
• Finally, by automating tasks, the solution has enabled corporate teams saving time to prepare financial communication.