Santa Claus is stressed out due to planning

Apart from the usual Christmas business, he is also worried this year by profit concerns as he has recently gone into the red. It’s high time to whip performance into shape.

The presents business has become hard. Apart from an increasingly complex business environment, Santa has had to contend with completely new challenges for some years now:

  1. More and more children wish to order their presents from the online competition.
  2. Judging whether a child has been good or not is becoming more and more complicated. Many children now play their tricks anonymously on social media platforms. Santa simply no longer has the time for a detailed good-bad evaluation.
  3. Individual cost drivers are regularly breaking the budget: excessive wrapping paper costs, an explosion in the travel costs of elves, the exorbitant cost of repairs to machines for the production of toys etc.
  4. The presents children ask for are becoming more and more outrageous and sophisticated. Santa often loses track of all his Excel sheets that he has created for this.

On top of this come further problems such as climate change, making the North Pole only partially passable by toboggan, as well as new and stricter animal welfare regulations for keeping reindeer.

Integrated Christmas Planning

Santa Claus would be well advised to switch to an efficient planning method as this is the only way he can continue to maintain his position as clear market leader in the presents industry in the future. We recommend that he adopt an alternative approach to ensure flexible and target-oriented planning. His business relies too heavily on unforeseeable underlying conditions to stick to a rigid budget year after year.

Flexible methods such as driver-based planning or the rolling forecasting approach would undoubtedly be better solutions. One particular challenge for Santa will be to define all his different planning areas and integrate them in the overall planning. After all, a self-contained planning model indisputably leads to a clear improvement in profitability, the balance sheet structure, net current assets and cash flow. This is obviously of the utmost importance for a listed company such as North Pole Santa Inc. The use of a suitable planning solution is recommended so as to ensure flawless implementation of an efficient budgeting and planning method and finally break out of Excel-hell. As a small Christmas present, Apliqo would be happy to offer him a six-month trial version of Apliqo FPM.


Do you wish to know more about Apliqo? Klick HERE.


Related Posts

More resources

How Apliqo UX streamlines cross-department collaboration

Better collaboration starts with effective communication, not just verbally, but through the way that you visualise and communicate your data. Learn how Apliqo UX can help you improve your data storytelling.

Read this article

Unpacking 5 of the latest trends in business intelligence and analytics – so that you can level up your business

Let’s walk through five key trends to be aware of as you shape your business intelligence and analytics for 2023 and beyond.

Read this article
Unpacking 5 of the latest trends in business intelligence and analytics

How to improve your budgeting accuracy

Improving the accuracy of your budgets can have a significant impact on your company’s performance. Here are four ways you can do just that.

Read this article

4 key metrics to measure FP&A success

Use these five metrics to evaluate how your FP&A system is performing, so that you can make the optimisations you need to get the most out of your tools.

Read this article

The importance of training your staff when pursuing excellence in planning and analytics

Training your staff might be the most sustainable path to FP&A excellence, and it might just transform your business for the better.

Read this article