Genesis Energy gains Insightful forecasting with IBM Planning Analytics

A friend’s referral, reference checks and the presentation they made to us. Knowing Belinda (Mindfull CEO) had an accounting background gave us confidence that we weren’t going to get an IT view of the world.

It was taking us a good three months to do a budget or forecast, so our idea was to put in a system that a) was a lot more robust and b) wasn’t reliant on particular individuals to get it all together

• We had over 1,000 spreadsheets. Fusion5 brought all that together and now we’ve eliminated over 980 of them
• It used to take us three months to do a forecast. Now we do one every month
• We used to have a lot of IP sitting in people’s heads. Fusion5 was able to extract information from our people and put it into the system

"We had over 1,000 spreadsheets. Fusion5 brought all that together and now we've eliminated over 980 of them."

Audrey Scheurich, Genesis General Manager of Finance

Fusion5 had people working on weekends, they had people working overnight in South Africa and getting back to us in the morning. All that sort of thing to make sure deadlines were met. To be fair, we weren’t on time in the end, but Fusion5 did respond when we needed to zip it up.

Genesis Energy recently went through the IPO Process. As part of that process there was a whole lot of work done around scenario analysis — What happens if we change the price path? What happens if we change the customer numbers? We’d create a version in IBM Planning Analytics (formally Cognos TM1), make a change, and basically overnight we could rerun that scenario. Rather than taking us weeks and weeks to run those scenarios, we were basically doing it over a couple of days. It was a godsend.

As well as speeding things up, our business has a better understanding of what our forecasts are built on and what our key drivers are. Now we all work with one set of assumptions. IBM Planning Analytics (formally Cognos TM1) has become the one source of the truth.