Uberall connects planning across the organization

At a glance

• The Uberall FP&A team had a vision of ‘connected planning’ that they wanted to fulfill - other tools had failed here, leaving them unable to create the bottom-up model they needed.
• Their implementation of Pigment helped them connect HR, sales, marketing, and financial planning.
• Now armed with the right data, the FP&A team are much more comfortable offering decision-making support to the business.
• They increased their planning frequency from quarterly to weekly, increasing their risk management capability as they can react faster to change.
• They leverage Pigment’s AI assistants to empower users in and outside of finance to accelerate time to value on data requests, insights and decision-making.

Uberall is a retail SaaS platform providing hybrid customer experiences for retailers. This helps them stand out even more with connected, hyperlocal experiences. They count 500+ employees and manage 1.35 million locations across the world. 

Turning challenges into opportunities

Uberall was facing problems tying together their planning. With processes scattered across departments and countries, decision-making was difficult and slow, which hurt their risk management. This lack of an integrated planning approach was affecting the quality of decisions made at meetings, impacting the overall performance of the organization.

Their implementation of Pigment started with financial reporting and workplace planning back in early 2022. Since then, they built various models to satisfy Uberall’s needs to connect decentralised planning and performance analytics and insights. Their vision with Pigment was to transform their FP&A function to be more agile, automated, frequent, connected, accurate and detailed.

As a result, they were able to gain visibility over all the data concerning HR, sales, marketing, and finance.

Decision-making support

One of the primary intentions behind incorporating Pigment was to make organizational decisions more data-driven. Decisions made in rooms filled with executives are invariably crucial to a company's future, and Pigment provides the factual support these decisions require.

Pigment's implementation meant Uberall now possessed the necessary data and analysis to reinforce the decisions taken in significant meetings.

Becoming a more durable business

Pigment also enabled the team to increase their forecasting frequency from quarterly to monthly, and then weekly. Doing so provides more up-to-date insight on business performance, ultimately allowing Uberall to react faster to change and mitigate risks.

Another aspect where Pigment proved invaluable was stress-testing Uberall's strategies. The brand used Pigment to construct various scenarios and systematically assess how solid their business and short-term plans were.

Scenario planning and stress testing are part of Pigment's distinct feature set, which allows for unlimited dimensions. It enables teams to see clearly what their plan looks like, dissect it down to its most minor elements and understand the breadth and depth of its dynamics.

AI and agents

The Uberall team is using Pigment's AI assistants to:

• Drill down into financial performance intuitively and make forecasts more granular at the customer, product, vendor, and employee level.
• Identify performance drivers in a faster, on-demand manner.
• Analyze sales performance by leveraging various attributes in their customer data.
• Gain deeper visibility on their expense and variance analysis vs. their budgets.

But that's not all. Uberall is an early adopter of Pigment's Analyst Agent, having participated in the private preview. They're using it to automate OPEX analysis:

"What used to take 3–5 hours for OPEX analysis now takes just minutes. Beyond speed, it also adds a layer of quality control - pre-validating data to catch errors before month-end close. And because it’s easy to deploy across functions, we’re now running more frequent, standardized reports and supporting teams we previously didn’t have capacity to serve."

Eda Karael, FP&A Director, Uberall

Eda describes the Analyst Agent as 'like adding an extra team member' - undertaking repetitive, time-consuming tasks so that the real members of her team can focus on higher-value work.

To learn more about Pigment AI, click here.