The company’s existing financial planning processes, rooted in Excel spreadsheets, were cumbersome and inefficient. Teams across departments worked in silos, leading to difficulties in aligning budgeting assumptions and coordinating multiple versions of the budget. This fragmented approach created version control issues and hindered strategic alignment, making it challenging to present a clear and unified financial picture.

Key challenges specific to the maritime industry included:

• Complex Vessel and Operational Costs: Managing a large fleet of vessels with varying operational costs, such as fuel, dry-docking, maintenance, and crew wages, made accurate cost allocation and forecasting extremely difficult using Excel-based methods.
• Dynamic Market Conditions: Fluctuating global oil prices and shipping rates posed a challenge in maintaining real-time, flexible budgets, which were difficult to adjust when using manual spreadsheets.
• Scenario Planning Limitations: Without the ability to easily simulate different scenarios (e.g., changes in fuel costs or fluctuations in demand for oil), the company was unable to proactively assess the financial impact of these variables on their long-term profitability.

To address these challenges, the company partnered with Keyrus and implemented Anaplan, a connected planning platform. The goal was to streamline the financial planning and budgeting processes by creating a centralized platform that would facilitate seamless collaboration across departments and provide greater flexibility in scenario planning.

Keyrus worked closely with the company’s financial teams to understand their processes, define the necessary data for planning, and transform existing Excel-based workflows onto Anaplan. The following maritime-specific configurations were incorporated:

• Vessel-Level Financial Modeling: Anaplan was configured to enable financial modeling at the vessel level, tracking revenue, costs, and ROI for each ship from construction phase to scrap value sale.
• Operational Cost Integration: The solution integrated complex cost calculations for fuel, maintenance, crew wages, and insurance, allowing the company to manage and forecast expenses with greater precision.
• Real-Time Scenario Planning: With Anaplan, stakeholders could simulate a wide range of market conditions (e.g., fluctuations in oil prices or changes in shipping demand) and assess their financial impact in real-time.
• Centralized Data and Version Control: Anaplan centralized all financial data from multiple departments, ensuring accurate and consistent information across the organization while improving version control and collaboration.