Tarmac, a CRH company and the UK’s leading sustainable building materials group, moves millions of tons of construction materials by road, sea, and rail to thousands of customer sites every year. This complexity requires accurate sales and operations planning (S&OP) and financial plans to ensure efficiency and profitability. The company’s old process, based on spreadsheets and databases, lacked multi-user access and was hampered by its disjointed nature.
Tarmac built a Connected Planning foundation based on the Anaplan platform to streamline its S&OP and financial planning. Implemented with the aid of Anaplan Partner Mentat Technology, the new solution delivers dynamic stock management, greater visibility into material flows and inventory, and more accurate sourcing decisions. Thanks to connections across S&OP and finance, the impacts of planning decisions are visible throughout the process.
Using the Anaplan platform, Tarmac has shortened its monthly financial planning process by two weeks and eliminated hundreds of spreadsheets. The benefits have spilled over to sales forecasting, formerly a 16-day process that now takes only four days. “Our partnership with Anaplan has transformed the way we plan and forecast,” says Sam Fergus, Tarmac’s Senior Manager: Logistics Excellence. “It allows us to support our customer network across the country to ensure that they continue to have the right product in the right place at the right time.”
Tarmac chose Anaplan because the company needed a unified source of information that could span the business. The Tarmac team appreciates the fact that calculations and formulas in Anaplan are transparent, owned by the business, and easy to model.
The Anaplan platform enables Tarmac’s finance and supply chain employees to access the right data for their individual tasks while working with shared drivers, data, and goals, and establishes a solid foundation for the future. “Increasing our ability to deliver effective planning and forecasting is essential to helping us evolve our business,” Fergus says.