A Management Reporting Platform for Continuous Improvement

The Situation

A global infrastructure equity firm was looking for a better solution to its data challenges.

Today, the success of private equity firms hinges on having accurate, accessible data on its assets.

One Sydney-based global infrastructure equity firm was looking for a better solution to its data challenges. To generate reports, asset managers downloaded data from an industry database, loaded it into spreadsheets, and re-validated it before sending to management.

Two things caused the firm to look for a better solution:

1. The database owners pivoted from being a database platform provider to being a private-equity information provider and cutting back on their database development.
2. The asset managers’ individual spreadsheet-based processes created inconsistent results that didn’t provide reliable apples-to-apples comparisons between assets.

“There was no reliable central repository for information,” recalls the firm’s operations director. “Every time we needed to know how an asset is performing, we had to call the asset manager.”

The infrastructure equity firm wanted more than simply a replacement system—the firm wanted to transform its reporting process. They contacted the consulting firm, Lionpoint.

The Approach

Moving beyond replacement to transformation: creating an Anaplan solution for a powerful management reporting platform.

“The technical expertise and the customer references Lionpoint brought for Anaplan made a very good combination,” the operations director recalls. “Lionpoint provided personal attention and were big enough to assure me that they could do the job and support us in the future.”

Lionpoint recommended Anaplan because its agile approach assisted in identifying issues with the client’s existing processes, such as inconsistencies in business rules across different assets. The agile nature of the project delivery allowed Lionpoint to refocus the project’s priorities in order to deliver areas of the project that provided the client with the greatest benefit, first.

The client started by identifying 20 properties in one region, managed by 15 asset managers and with a total value of around $20 billion, for a pilot. Asset data from the database was brought into Anaplan and validated. Then, an interface was built so on-site property managers could still provide monthly familiar spreadsheets; that were automatically fed into Anaplan for verification by asset managers. The finance team then created live reports from Anaplan data using Power BI for viewing on tablets.

“The challenges faced by this client were exacerbated by the global pandemic,” Nick Moore, Founder at Lionpoint Group, recalls. “Lionpoint quickly identified the data and reporting issues and created an Anaplan solution that aggregated unique asset data into a powerful management reporting platform.”

Anaplan allows for transferred adjustments to be made to the source data, and users can easily identify data that needs to be corrected. This allows them to make a conscious decision on whether any upstream processes needed to change in order to reduce or eliminate future data adjustments.

The Impact

Continuous growth and continuous improvement to the firm’s financial advantage.

In addition to creating more reliable reports, having the data from all assets in a single repository lets the firm leverage its size for financial advantage. “Our buying power is huge when we identify items—from furniture to consulting services—that we need at multiple sites,” the operations director says. “We can now negotiate discounts with suppliers because all of the data is in one Anaplan repository.”

Other units of the infrastructure equity fund’s parent company are also using Anaplan, and the operations director foresees additional uses for the platform in his group beyond financial reporting. The customer considers Anaplan’s world-class platform security to be paramount when working with such sensitive data.

With Lionpoint’s help, having a wealth of data in Anaplan will enable the company to benchmark performance over time, identify and address underperforming assets in the portfolio, and reward teams that meet and exceed key performance indicators (KPIs). The solution’s value will only increase over time, the operations director concludes: “The more historical data we have in Anaplan, the more we’ll be able to improve.”