Linde Engineering, LLC
Managing and planning (costs, personnel, and capacity) for over 300 cost centers is a highly complex task. As requirements evolved over time, Linde Engineering’s Excel-based planning process had become significantly less flexible and efficient.
After a period of evaluation, the plant engineering company therefore decided to implement Board for cost center planning. Within a very short time, the financial controlling department was able to put the Board solution into productive use for top-down planning.
The Company: A World Leader in Plant Engineering
Linde Engineering is a division of Linde AG. The Engineering Division, based in Pullach near Munich, is a technology leader in international plant engineering.
With more than 1,000 process engineering patents and 4,000 plants built, Linde Engineering is a world leader in plant engineering.
Customers around the world rely on Linde Engineering’s unmatched cost-effectiveness, on-time delivery, and reliability when building their facilities.
The facts at a glance:
✓ Flexible planning solution
✓ Dynamic simulation features
✓ Automated and streamlined reporting
✓ Greater level of detail in planning
✓ Fast and accurate implementation by celver
The Challenge: Complexity in Cost Center Planning
The Controlling Headquarters department at Linde Engineering is responsible, among other things, for the centralized planning of over 300 cost centers and all overhead projects. Until now, those in charge had been creating cost center plans in Excel, which required a great deal of effort. “Simply put, with Excel, we were spending more time on the manual processing of over 50,000 data records than on the actual planning of the cost centers,” says Levente Boldvai, Head of Controlling Headquarters at Linde Engineering. “Gradually, we lost consistency between headcount, capacity, and cost planning. We had to find an alternative,” Boldvai continues.
As a consulting firm with extensive expertise in planning processes and business analytics, celver AG was commissioned to conduct a tool evaluation at Linde. The entire planning processes were designed in a target-oriented manner during joint workshops and visualized on a plot several meters long. Based on the jointly defined processes, methods and procedures were then designed to simplify the logic of cost allocations, enabling rapid calculation of results across a wide range of simulation scenarios during the planning phase. The target processes, the defined metrics, and the integration into the overall system landscape formed the basis for the tool selection. In the course of the evaluation, it became clear that the board decision-making platform, which integrates analysis, simulation, and planning functions, is the tool of choice.
“During a proof-of-concept with celver, we realized that Board would finally allow us to refocus on the content of our planning while also giving us a whole new level of flexibility thanks to the drill-down and drill-anywhere features. This makes it possible to view the planning from different perspectives and at different levels of detail, and, for example, to simulate our cost center allocation methods in Board,” explains Boldvai.
The Solution: An Agile Planning Tool as a Guarantee of Success
From integrating the SAP system—used company-wide at Linde—through the data warehouse to mapping the planning process in Board, celver not only supported Linde Engineering in evaluating tools but also built and implemented the new solution—both functionally and technically—in just a few weeks. “We were absolutely pleasantly surprised at how quickly the new solution for top-down cost center planning in Board could be put into productive use. We already have a much better picture of our cost structure and can plan more efficiently,” explains Boldvai.
In a second phase of the project, we plan to establish a bottom-up planning process so that planning can be coordinated with the department heads at the cost center nodes and fine-tuned accordingly. “What’s outstanding is that we’ve already mastered the biggest challenge—our crowning achievement, so to speak, in the entire project—by already simulating cost center allocations, internal activity-based costing, and hourly rate calculations. In that regard, I’m very confident that, following our very positive experience working with celver, we’ll be able to implement bottom-up planning just as quickly,” says Boldvai.
Whereas planning used to be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process before Board was introduced, it has quickly evolved into a dynamic simulation model at Linde. “The ability to quickly create multidimensional planning down to the finest levels of detail was exactly what we needed at Linde. For example, the reporting requirements we have internally for budgeting, where we design different views of the planning—it was virtually impossible to present that consistently in an Excel model. New parameters can now also be added quickly. In Excel, that sometimes took 1 to 2 days.”
“Now it takes just half an hour, and the figures are recalculated automatically,” explains Boldvai. “This newfound flexibility and agility with Board is also reflected in our overall collaboration with celver AG. From tool evaluation to process mapping—which made our specific planning requirements transparent in the first place—all the way to fast and reliable implementation—all of this convinced us that we’ve found the right tool with the right partner,” concludes Boldvai.
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