U.S. News: Pep Boys Implements Budgeting and Reporting Solution

Adaptive Planning, supplier of financial planning and reporting solutions, announced that U.S. service and parts chain, The Pep Boys,  has implemented its solution for managing the budgeting process across its multiple divisions and 580 stores.

“We are delighted to partner with Pep Boys to provide financial planning and reporting solutions,” said William A. Soward, Adaptive Planning’s CEO. “As a service suite, our software is designed to help companies of all sizes more easily and quickly compare actuals to plan, conduct ‘what-if’ analyses, make strategic decisions and take action. We are pleased to have been able to deploy a complete budgeting and reporting solution that supports Pep Boys’ extensive network of stores — and in just six weeks.”

According to Adaptive Planning, benefits include:

* Better access to information, improving Pep Boys’ ability to adjust to shifting consumer spending trends

* Flexible modeling environment that supported the creation of sophisticated driver-based financial models

* Intuitive interface that allowed non-technical users to be trained quickly and remotely

* Rapid implementation and training times enabled an immediate impact on the business

* Significant savings in license fees and IT costs compared to on-premise alternatives resulted in greater cost effectiveness

* Access to online training and Adaptive Planning’s team of financial planning experts, together with a “no IT required” solution, allowed Pep Boys to go live without pulling IT or finance resources off other important projects

“With Adaptive Planning, we were able to save approximately 600 man hours in the first budgeting cycle alone, which allowed our team to spend more time on high-value analysis rather than lower-value process management,” said Phil McAllister, director of budgeting and internal reporting for Pep Boys. “We’ve had exceptional buy-in from our users because we were able to keep our familiar templates while improving the distribution, collection and analysis processes. This overall approach results in greater accuracy, improved ownership and accountability throughout the organization and a more strategic financial management process.”