While sustainability may only have been at the forefront of some businesses and people’s minds more recently, Reconomy Group has been on a mission since 1994 to create a truly sustainable world by conserving finite resources. Supporting businesses around the world, Reconomy Group helps its customers improve their ESG outcomes through innovation, data and specialist expertise to embrace the circular economy and create sustainable value.
Now, having acquired 16 companies in the last 4 years, Reconomy Group is expanding vastly. Therefore, it needed an internal infrastructure shift to bring greater visibility over its broad finance and accounting systems, as well as increased management of M&A integration. These needs were a perfect match for Anaplan, whose agile planning tools and user experience made the integration a breeze.
“With growth like this comes a huge amount of change and diversity. As a result, we have accumulated a broad group of financial and accounting systems and it was clear that we needed a robust consolidation of these systems and FP&A budgeting platform”, says Jody Fullman, Group CIO, Reconomy Group.
The company was looking for a solution that could provide the envisaged scalability, functionality and agility for its future operations, reporting, and budgeting needs, including a ‘what-if’ and scenario analysis, or the capability to integrate information into a central point, allowing the departments to access and report based on a single version of information. Having already looked at legacy companies on the market, Anaplan felt like the right choice for Reconomy Group to address its specific needs and empower teams to effectively manage the businesses reporting requirements and better yet, Anaplan, also seamlessly integrates with the other technologies it uses day to day.
In addition to reporting requirements, it was really important for Reconomy Group to effortlessly integrate into the business its newly acquired companies. To achieve this, the company wanted to arm its finance teams with the right, easy-to-use tools to quickly onboard newly acquired businesses. “Before, we had to outsource that tech skillset but now, we can do it internally and in a much shorter time frame”, continues Fullman.
“Your finance team is the beating heart of your businesses. When you go through such a period of growth as Reconomy Group has, it’s really important that you consider your finance team’s tech stack, so that everything seamlessly integrates into one ecosystem”, says Nadine Pichelot, VP Finance, EMEA at Anaplan. “This department needs to be effectively supported with an optimised and connected planning tool, giving employees a holistic overview of financials for more accurate, real-time data analysis and forecast predictions.
Empowered by the Anaplan platform, Reconomy Group is able to plan and consolidate more confidently, with greater visibility. The company worked with Anaplan EMEA Partner of the Year, Bedford Consulting to implement the financial consolidation and FP&A project.
