“One single source of truth: centralized control data as a strategic lever for the CIO”

The Bonduelle Group places great cultural importance on budget Tracking, with a management control system that is very demanding in terms of information. Our management processes cover several dimensions: Projects portfolio, Budgets, Purchasing, Suppliers and Resources. We had built a system to monitor these elements on a daily basis, but manual management via spreadsheets was reaching its limits. Data consolidation was becoming complex and time-consuming. It was therefore essential to strengthen our tools to reinforce and improve our financial management.

Our goal was twofold:

• Make our managers more responsible for monitoring their expenses (committed, landed, consumed)
• Move from an effective system to an efficient one: in other words, achieve the same results with minimum effort, thanks to standardized practices, improved data quality and, ultimately, time and money savings.

With Abraxio, we quickly saw the benefits of centralizing all our processes in a single tool, offering a native link between the different modules and shared information in real time. This enabled us to streamline and optimize our management immediately.

Finally, a key point in our approach was the involvement of CIO managers. We have profoundly transformed their role in budget Tracking, so it was essential that they were at the heart of the choice of solution. We didn’t want to impose a tool on them, but rather offer them a solution whose added value they could immediately perceive.

Abraxio’s main budgeting benefits are clear: streamlined processes, time savings, efficiency, and greater alignment with management control.

At Bonduelle, our budget management process is mature and structured, with a strong attention to detail. We chose Abraxio because it fully meets our needs in this area.

Previously, we found it difficult to make the link between our “last estimate” and our P&L Budgets, which led to significant discrepancies at year-end between our figures and those of management control. Abraxio changed our lives: we were able to reconcile the two visions (cash out and P&L) and are now perfectly aligned with management control. We can clearly differentiate between our cash expenses over the fiscal year and multi-year commitments when these exceed the duration of the fiscal year. This alignment with management control is a major step forward, particularly with regard to the management of prepaid expenses, cash flow and the impact of expense management on results.

The activation of the CCA functionality for expenses incurred over more than 12 months has enabled us to gain even greater maturity in budget management, and to be closer to the vision of management control. We can now precisely monitor the difference between expenses incurred (our orders) and those actually consumed (invoiced), enabling us to come as close as possible to the actual amount consumed at the end of the financial year. It’s almost a feat!

Abraxio has the enormous advantage of centralizing all CIO Budgets, including Projects. This is what we mean by ” single source of truth for all “. In concrete terms, when a project manager works on or adjusts his or her budget, everything is automatically synchronized in the tool with the CIO’s overall budget.

This used to be a real sticking point: the Budgets worked out by the Project managers in the portfolio management tool never matched the centrally consolidated vision in our spreadsheets, forcing endless adjustments. Now, what’s worked on is also what’s visible, and that’s a real relief!

Thanks to Abraxio, we can also jointly track the “build” and associated “run” Budgets for each Project, something that was particularly complex in the past. This connection between the Budgets and the portfolio is a real advantage of the tool: we can track the OPEX – Operational Expenditure – generated by a project, by linking it to a specific analytical axis.

Over and above this connection between Budgets and the Projects portfolio, we particularly appreciate the fact that Abraxio gives us a consolidated view of all CIO activity: runs, evolutions and Projects. This structure enables us to anticipate and better prepare our future Budgets, notably by estimating more precisely the time devoted to run activities.

Another major advantage is that the tool offers a multi-year view of each project’s Budgets. This makes it possible to visualize not only the overall cost, but also the breakdown of budgetary impacts over each fiscal year. Tracking is fully integrated into the tool, and is carried out naturally, without any additional effort.

Finally, the standardization of Projects Tracking offered by Abraxio is a real time-saver. By default, the tool offers analytical axes (taken from Cigref), flash reports, standardized statements and project milestones, which we can customize or use as they stand to optimize our processes.

Having seen many Project portfolio management (PPM) tools in my career, Abraxio stands out for its simplicity and all-in-one approach. A project manager will find everything he or she needs: initial and revised Budgets (and automated links with finance), Gantt, Manage project risks… Everything is at hand and easy to use. Among our 15 project managers, some of whom are not 100% dedicated to Project management, the adoption of Abraxio has been natural and unhindered. That’s a real strength!

The Abraxio implementation began with a two-week pre-validation phase with the CIO, two cost pool managers and two management control managers, to assess what each could get out of the tool. To confirm our choice, we simply loaded our budget into Abraxio to check that we were back on track, with a focus on budget management, and on the portfolio, on the Projects budget.

The aim was also to test the simulation part, which was really tedious in our spreadsheets, and to integrate our data immediately, so that everyone could see in a real-life situation what a difference it made: a single tool to manage, centralizing all the information, rather than X files and X meetings with all the players in the process, especially management control.

Buy-in was very rapid, right from the first workshops. We had deliberately put together a varied panel of users, with some naturally supportive profiles and others more skeptical, who we knew would ask questions and give feedback. In the end, everyone immediately saw the value of the solution, which only confirmed our intuition that Abraxio was the right answer to our needs.

We then set up weekly workshops where everyone came with their questions after using the tool. Everything went smoothly and without any particular difficulty, especially as we had anticipated by structuring the analytical axes and preparing a ready-to-use base for the managers.

What really surprised us was the speed of installation. We were used to software packages whose installation required several days of configuration, followed by the publisher’s “disappearance”. With Abraxio, the support was totally different: short, regular sessions (once a week at the start), enabling the implementation to be adjusted progressively, with a focus on a specific module or functionality. This highly responsive, iterative approach has proved particularly effective.

Our initial idea was to use Abraxio only to build our N+1 Budgets, leaving the current year’s tracking in Excel to avoid disrupting the Teams too much. In the end, the benefits were so obvious that we decided to accelerate and immediately switch the current year’s Tracking to the tool. We gave ourselves a month to structure our data properly. Abraxio integrates standard bases, such as the Cigref categorization, but also allows advanced parameterization, with the possibility of adding analytical axes specific to each organization. It was therefore essential to take the time needed to structure our data in order to guarantee good day-to-day management, and to meet the future needs of the CIO and management control. We therefore reviewed and structured our data, reconstituted our validated Budgets in the tool to produce a first draft, and then integrated the first updated versions. This stage also provided an opportunity to adapt our processes, by deleting numerous Excel files and redefining certain workflows, notably for purchasing. Once this base was stabilized, we onboarded our 15 managers.

The next step was to build our reports. It wasn’t enough to have structured the data, we also had to be able to render it in a format familiar to finance and management control. We rebuilt not only our financial reports, but also our quality control reports. The parameterization proved to be very user-friendly, as simple as a pivot table: just select the required fields, without any complex manipulation. What’s particularly interesting is that all the data can be accessed directly in the tool, with no need to export them. The ability to import and integrate data, particularly budget and supplier lines, is a real plus, as is the possibility of exporting all data to a pre-formatted, structured Excel file, including all tables and data if required.

At the end of this preparation phase, we officially launched the monitoring of the current year in the tool, as well as the preparation of the budget for N+1, based on the budget extension function, which greatly simplifies this task.

From there, we entered a consolidation phase, with managers being supported in their new practices. Those who had used the tool at the outset helped the others, which accelerated the collective development of skills.

At the same time, we were in the midst of building our Budgets, and thoroughly tested the simulation functions by creating several versions of the budget. Having the tool at this point was a real asset: we produced numerous versions and could easily compare the variances to measure the relevance of each adjustment compared to the initial version. This proved particularly useful in our work with purchasing and finance, as everyone could follow the evolution of the scenarios live, thanks to Abraxio’s on-screen display.

For portfolio tracking and Teams time management, we were previously using another tool. After a few weeks’ use, we switched all our teams over to Abraxio and deployed the portfolio module to project leaders and managers. Initially, we asked them to focus on Workload management, by staffing Teams on Projects and Run or Support activities, so that everyone could then point to their tasks in the tool. This transition was extremely rapid: within one or two weeks, everything was in place. As far as time tracking was concerned, we let the managers onboard their Teams. As the tool is very ergonomic and well thought-out, adoption was immediate, with no particular questions asked.

For Projects managers, the learning curve was even quicker. Abraxio makes it possible to link project portfolios to Budgets, and we had pre-loaded all the Projects in progress or due for completion by the end of the financial year. All they had to do was log in, update their Capacity plans and schedules, and everything was automatically linked to our Budgets. That’s what made the Deployment so efficient.

After a few weeks, we relaunched the portfolio subject by taking it a step further: we set up a community of project managers, with regular animation to improve our project and portfolio management practices. We have defined our project reporting requirements and chosen to focus initially on our fifteen biggest ongoing Projects. To do this, we use Abraxio’s standardized flash report, which extracts reports in PowerPoint or PDF format. This format is very useful for communicating monthly on the progress of Projects, with KPIs on weather, risks, planning and Budgets, thus guaranteeing an up-to-date view of the portfolio.