Messe Berlin, one of the leading organisers of international trade fairs, congresses and events, is transforming its financial planning processes with Board's Enterprise Planning platform. The objective: to create a centralised, more transparent and more agile environment to better manage its operations.
With more than 200 years of history as a venue for economic and professional exchanges in Berlin, Messe Berlin now manages an ecosystem comprising several entities and activities. This complex organisation required an evolution in planning methods to gain efficiency and visibility.
Moving away from fragmented Excel processes to strengthen financial management
Before implementing Board, Messe Berlin's planning processes relied heavily on Excel files and manual consolidations. This approach could limit the speed of budgeting cycles, complicate information sharing between different teams and reduce overall visibility into performance.
The company therefore wanted a solution capable of bringing together planning, analysis and reporting in a single environment, while maintaining the ability of the various entities to contribute to financial processes.
A central platform for planning and analysis
Deployed with the support of partner H&Z.digital, the Board solution is becoming a true hub for financial planning and performance management.
In an initial phase, Messe Berlin is implementing several key features:
- budget management;
- monthly financial forecasts (forecast);
- multi-year strategic planning;
- integrated financial planning including the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow;
- management reporting;
- performance indicator analysis.
Connected to existing systems, including SAP, the platform aims to provide a common data foundation to improve the consistency of financial information and facilitate decision-making.
More agile and collaborative planning
One of the project's key challenges is to enable decentralised planning while maintaining a consolidated view at the management control level.
Thanks to simulation and scenario analysis capabilities, teams can better anticipate different possible developments and support strategic decisions with more reliable data.
For Messe Berlin, this transformation should reduce manual tasks, improve data quality and accelerate planning cycles.
By progressively developing Board as a central FP&A solution, the company aims to build a sustainable foundation to support its future decisions and strengthen collaboration among its different teams.
This project also demonstrates the changing role of finance, now increasingly focused on analysis, anticipation and strategic business support.
source: Board
