Real-time visibility across Marketing Funds: Part 1

This story comes directly from one Orbis’ clients. It is a great reminder of the value in management information being close to hand. Hope you get some value out of it.

The VP Marketing received a call from a regional GM. “My team hasn’t been tracking their costs effectively and have overspent my budget. I need more money”.

The VP Marketing thought: “This happens every year”. (She kept a stash of budget aside for such an event).

However, this simple request produced other, more important questions:

How much budget was available from other funds?
How had this GM allowed the budget to be overspent? Was this a systemic issue across the business?

Three days later, the information the VP needed still had not arrived. On the fourth day, the information arrived but was simply wrong.

The problem was that each Marketing team had different definitions for Financial terms.

Words such as “Committed” and “Forecast” (e.g. some Marketers defined “Committed” as how much they had promised to suppliers, even if just through a handshake agreement; but Finance defined “Committed” as Purchase Order raised).

This lack of standardization meant the financial data was inconsistent and the VP was still unable to make a decision on the reallocation of funds for the GM.

Moreover, 22 people had been involved in answering these questions! The VP had asked seven GMs for their information; the GMs had asked nine of their people who in turn had brought in six more Marketing staff to assist.

So, one question led to an avalanche of inefficient activity. A question that should have taken almost no time to answer, had taken up over 200 hours of the organisation’s time.

And the data was still incorrect.

The VP’s dilemma was significant. “How can I run this business if I don’t have consistent financial information?” she asked herself. “We are an international brand, recognized around the world – we simply can not be so inefficient at financial decision making”.

Liam Royes
Director, Product & Solutions Group