British American Tobacco GCC completes implementation of KCI's CONTROL

The solution is enabling BAT GCC to streamline and effectively manage the performance of its business across seven markets in the Middle East, delivering a comprehensive, consistent viewpoint for improved decision-making across the organization.

CONTROL improves BAT GCC's ability to collect, correlate, analyze and model decision-critical data across functions, geographies, and business units. Built on a common meta-data and data repository, with one-stop comprehensive functionality, one single point of maintenance, and one consistent user interface, CONTROL is helping BAT GCC better compete in the marketplace by replacing a patchwork of functionally siloed Excel-based spreadsheets, which consumed time and opportunity.

"Before implementing CONTROL, more than 90 percent of our data was on multiple spreadsheets," said Paul George, planning and reporting manager, British American Tobacco GCC. "This meant our staff was often working with conflicting numbers, which proved troublesome and time consuming. Now, all managers are utilizing the same CONTROL-based planning environment, which makes consolidation an effortless process. We are saving a great deal of time and avoiding many headaches."

By providing data and process unification and real-time accessibility for BAT GCC's budgeting, monitoring and forecasting, CONTROL is enabling managers across the region to submit sales figures and stock keeping unit (SKU) volumes using common formats and formulas. The product has removed the need for managers to manually synchronize and re-tally data - assuring accuracy and shortening cycles by more than a week in many cases. Additionally, CONTROL's user-friendly Excel interface has enabled BAT GCC to keep training time to a minimum while still assuring employees are comfortable with the software.

Using CONTROL, BAT GCC is also enjoying significant improvements in its ability to forecast sales over a 24-month period on a rolling basis. The forecasts now always reflect the latest market conditions and changes. With a portfolio of more than 35 products, BAT GCC breaks its SKUs into many segments, which has traditionally made predicting volume a difficult task. By working from a consistent model and common set of numbers, BAT GCC is now able to quickly compare SAP based actuals to budgets, manipulate data on the fly for hypothesized scenarios, and immediately analyze the "what if" eventualities since changes to the data ripple through the system in real time. In the competitive tobacco market, this capability enables BAT GCC to better determine the impact its operational and financial decisions will have on the organization's profit and loss statement.

British American Tobacco will continue to deploy CONTROL across the globe in 2006, and George expects the product's value to increase as more divisions and users utilize the system throughout the organization.

"Due to the competitive nature of the tobacco industry, an organization's success often hinges on having the visibility and agility to accurately assess the impact of its business decisions," said Max Kay, CEO, KCI Computing. "By providing a single source, dynamic planning and measurement environment, CONTROL provides BAT GCC the essential link that assures the commonality of its enterprise-wide business goals."