Mainstream achieve end-to-end budgeting automation enabling FP&A team greater access and speed to insight

Explore how Mainstream consolidated and automated their budgeting reporting.

Background  

Mainstream is a rapidly growing global renewable energy company specialising in building and developing wind and solar projects. The company approached VantagePoint with ambitious growth plans along with the need to increase the maturity of their finance systems to match these ambitions. They wanted to define a global standard for budget data capture and reporting.  

 Challenge  

Mainstream’s current people, processes and technology needed to reach a state of maturity that provided fast and accurate access to insight while cutting down the amount of manual effort involved in their budgeting process.  

These are the two biggest challenges the team needed our help in solving: 

1. Their existing budgeting and planning process was a combination of manual Excel files which lacked efficiency and was prone to human error.
2. The FP&A team were dealing with challenges around collaboration when attempting to simultaneously review and update data, this resulted in them lacking a “single source of truth” across their five global locations.   

Solution  

Our team worked with Mainstream to implement a single connected solution across their global business.  

This provided their team with the ability to: 

• Centralise all their data 
• Automate manual repetitive tasks which are prone to human error 
• Produce reporting for senior stakeholders that is of a much higher quality than ever before.   

Process   

Step 1 – Strategic alignment 

To begin, we needed to ensure we were all aligned, so we defined the company’s core requirements which were fed from the Group FP&A function.  

Step 2 – Stakeholder communication  

Once these had been defined, we engaged each of the five regions to ensure they were on board with any new plans. From a change management perspective, this was vital for a smooth transition of any new technology brought in.  

Step 3 – System selection and implementation 

Once we identified and defined the solution that needed to be implemented, we made sure it was fully embedded into their BAU way of working to avoid it being just another extra tool the team had to use.   

Outcome   

The new platform is now fully integrated into Mainstream’s business and their budget capture process has been automated end-to-end, facilitating the ability for consolidated reporting across regions and adhering to Group requirements. They are now able to generate a number of automated reports from a regional perspective which in turn facilitates reporting at Group level.  

We are now working with Mainstream to develop their new platform so that it can be leveraged across multiple additional capabilities such as consolidation and further FP&A use cases.