Qubix | Case Study - Ocado plc.

Ocado is the world's fastest growing online-only grocery retailer, which is why they needed a modern, scalable cloud-based reporting solution to support their global growth plans.

Ocado Group plc. has over 580,000 active shoppers, 230,000 orders per week and over £1.5 billion in annual revenue. Unlike its traditional competitors, Ocado has no brick-and-mortar stores and fulfils all home deliveries from its state-of-the-art automated warehouses. Despite its immense growth, Ocado's financial reporting processes were heavily reliant on a myriad of disconnected spreadsheets. This created challenges in data accuracy, time wastage and lack of business insight to support critical decision-making. Providing a scalable and insight-rich finance reporting system to sustain its long-term, competitive advantage was a key group-level priority.

The Ocado Group approached numerous partners to help modernize and re-platform its budget, forecast and reporting processes. Qubix was selected because of our success designing and implementing similar solutions for other large U.K. retailers. Our team of certified Oracle experts delivered Ocado's new reporting system in 12 weeks using our Journey to Cloud methodology. The project was delivered in two phases and followed the analyse, design, build and test approach to ensure all key requirements were fulfilled throughout the engagement.

"The reason for looking at Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud was to ensure that it helps us scale, but also helps us bring a lot more insight into our dynamic business."

Hetal Desai
Finance Director, Ocado plc.

Moreover, Qubix helped provide a 'single version of truth' which resulted in significant time-savings and improved data integrity. This included automated data loads and consolidations between the planning application and Ocado's ERP system.

"One source of truth is very important for a company like ours because we're growing and people have different data sources... having one data source in the cloud ensures confidence in the numbers."

Vineta Bajaj
Group Financial Controller, Ocado plc.

Challenges

Dependent on Excel templates to create budgets, forecasts and reports across income, balance sheet and cash flow for both management and statutory reporting
Non-standardized, error-prone and disconnected reporting process with significant 'key person' risk
Difficulty collating data from ERP system to create financial reports for key decision-making

Solution

Implementation of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) and Essbase cubes to hold the data sets
Phase 1 included management and statutory reporting and ad-hoc analysis via SmartView, followed by phase 2 that focused on payroll budgets and forecasts by employee and role
Automated data consolidation and loading from ERP system and other sources within PBCS
Qubix Journey to Cloud Methodology to accelerate delivery to the cloud

Results

Delivered cloud-based planning and budgeting for streamlined management and statutory reporting processes
Variance analysis between Actual, Forecast and Budget
Improved the accuracy and quality of budget information to support better decision-making
Eliminated manual Excel-based processes for financial reporting