Siemens

The Challenge: Lack of Transparency About Cause-and-Effect Relationships in Planning

Planning at Siemens Digital Factory covers a five-year horizon with an increased focus on the coming budget year. Within the division, all business units are responsible for preparing their own individual plans. In most cases, their planning was previously done in tables with individual logic, so that the connection between plan premises and plan figures was not transparent on an aggregated level and was very difficult to control.

Accordingly, the continuous adjustment of premises was complex later on. Moreover, thinking in scenarios was hardly possible due to the risk of inconsistencies and rigid individual plans. In order to make investment decisions about planned measures in the sense of effective resource allocation, there was a lack of transparency about the division-wide effects.

The Solution: Value-Driver-Based Simulation Tool for the Central Specification of Planning Premises and Targets

With its financial planning solution, Valsight provides a value-driver-based simulation tool that enables the central specification of plan premises and targets and thus offers a comprehensible, consistent and transparent basis for decision-making throughout the division.

"With the implementation of a value driver-based planning approach supported by Valsight, our goal is to increase transparency regarding the cause-and-effect relationships of influencing factors on our planning and ensure optimal resource allocation."

Stephan Pierer von Esch, Head of Division Planning and Controlling, Siemens Digital Factory

Using specific driver models for the respective business units, an update is defined from an imported ACTUAL record point with central drivers, so that complete plans can be calculated by updating individual drivers. All business units use the uniformly defined logic and centrally specified plan premises for the drivers to define measures and scenarios. These can be aggregated into an overall plan via the division hierarchy. A predefined structure based on a base scenario as well as ongoing and new measures enables division-wide transparency and traceability of assumptions and effects.

The Result: Efficient Planning and Effective Use of Resources

The Digital Factory Division of Siemens AG has worked with Valsight to make fundamental changes to the planning process. By implementing Valsight, Siemens has significantly simplified the planning process and saved unnecessary iterations. The driver-based planning approach enables effective resource allocation and efficient, cross-divisional planning in which new scenarios are flexibly created and talked through.

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About Siemens Digital Factory

The Digital Factory Division is the fourth-largest division of Siemens with more than €10 billion in sales and more than 45,000 employees. It offers companies from all over the world a comprehensive product portfolio and system solutions as well as lifecycle-related and data-based services to increase the efficiency, flexibility and quality of their manufacturing processes. Valsight was implemented at Siemens as a pilot project in 2016 and 2017, and the experience gained was used in the second year of operation to revise the model and specify additional requirements in order to ultimately achieve the desired transformation step by step.