Overcoming challenges with IBM Planning Analytics and HAYNE Solutions
Sumo Digital is one of the largest independent video game developers in the UK. Since 2003, the company has grown from a team of 13 people to 10 international studios.
Over the past couple of years, as they have continued to expand, Sumo have been going through a period of transforming their financial processes and systems, streamlining them to boost efficiency.
In doing this, Sumo faced several challenges, including:
- A lack of automation in their Financial Planning & Consolidation
- A need to structure their data better, as reports were being extracted and transformed in Excel
- The lack of ability to produce dynamic reports
- An enhanced need for more efficient and accurate reporting following Sumo’s listing on AIM
- FX/Currency Conversion requirements
- A slow month-end process
Ultimately, Sumo wanted to be able to drill down into specific projects at specific studio locations, a process that, at the time, was proving highly labour-intensive and time-consuming.
HAYNE Solutions was able to alleviate the challenges Sumo were facing by implementing IBM Cognos Controller & Planning Analytics. Both solutions allowed Sumo to automate its financial processes for consolidation and planning.
Indeed, Sumo now has a much better way of structuring its data. With numbers directly fed in from their GL, Sage, the financial reports Sumo now produce are much more understandable and easier to follow for non-finance stakeholders.
Since the addition of IBM Cognos Controller and IBM Planning Analytics, Sumo is now able to translate complex coding structure into meaningful user-friendly dimensions and hierarchies to easily slice the data, producing more understandable and easier-to-use reports.
By integrating IBM Planning Analytics with the support of HAYNE Solutions, Sumo now has a fit-for-purpose solution that integrates with the rest of its business processes, allowing the organisation to analyse the data in a way it previously couldn’t.
More information about the Sumo Digital case study can be found on HAYNE’s website here.
For another IBM Planning Analytics case study on TechStories, click here.
