Hourigan Runs Planning for 15 Business Units on a 3-Person FP&A Team with Planful

Hourigan has scaled quickly over the last several years, putting pressure on a lean, three-person FP&A team to plan and forecast across 15 business units. Its old way of planning could not keep up.

“Hourigan’s grown tremendously in the last couple of years, and before we had a financial platform that showed multi-year growth,” says Marlena Kennedy, FP&A Manager at Hourigan. “We could only see what the current project plans were and how long they extended.”

Since going live with Planful, Hourigan has:

• Standardized revenue forecasting across 15 business units with a shared financial model, replacing disparate Excel files.
• Ended the VLOOKUP reconciliation work between  the construction project-planning system, the CRM, and the forecast one forecasting process
• Cut the initial forecast roll-up from days to five minutes
• Given business unit leaders self-service reporting and drill-down to invoice-level actuals
• Extended the planning horizon past signed backlog, with multi-year targets for sales and business unit leaders
• Locked scenarios on deadline, so plans come back on time and in one shape
• Freed a three-person FP&A team to answer leadership on the fly

Before Planful, planning and forecasting lived in Excel, and it showed.

“When I joined the company, there was not really a standard process,” Marlena says. “Everyone was doing things their own way, calculating things a little bit differently.”

That made every cycle fragile. Nobody could fully trust a number until it had been checked by hand.

“We used to have different spreadsheets sent to us, with different manipulations to the spreadsheets that we couldn’t control,” Marlena says. “We’d send something out, and it would come back a little bit different.”

In addition, reporting ran on a separate legacy tool. It could not forecast, and only FP&A could access it, so business unit leaders waited for the team on every report.

Hourigan evaluated several platforms before signing with Planful. Two things separated it from the field: the customization to build around how Hourigan actually works, and the team that would put it in place.

“With other platforms we were looking at, we had to fit into the mold of that platform rather than having the custom ability we had a plan for,” says Marlena.  “Planful gave us the ability to customize different templates and planning scenarios that help us make decisions, rather than being put into a square box.”

For Hourigan, the platform was only half of it.

“One of the biggest things was the implementation team we met with during the sales process,” Marlena says. “They were somebody from our industry. They truly understood our needs rather than just a standardized view.”

A smooth rollout, with the right partner in her corner, proved to make an impact beyond the balance sheet. Marlena added, “To have a really good team like Planful and a really good implementation partner has been really great for my career growth.”

• Every business unit forecasts revenue the same way with Dynamic Planning. 15 business units now build their revenue forecasts from shared models in Planful so everyone calculates the same way and  FP&A can trust a number without checking it manually. “We use the dynamic planning platform for all of our revenue forecasting, which, before, was done on Excel spreadsheets,” Marlena says.
• One name across the financial system, the CRM, and the forecast. The same project used to go by three different names, and reconciling these was a manual process. “Having to marry those with VLOOKUPs and things in Excel was the biggest time suck of our lives,” Marlena says. Now the project system and the CRM both feed into Planful directly, and the team marries the two to build forecasting and budgeting scenarios from a single source of truth.
• Business unit leaders own their numbers. FP&A is no longer a bottleneck. Leaders can pull their own reports, forecast, and drill into actuals down to the last invoice, which helps them answer their own questions and plan at the pace of the business.
• The team can plan past the backlog. Before Planful, the team could see only as far as signed project plans extended. Now FP&A models targets and best-case scenarios against the forecast. “With Planful, we have the ability to see what the forecasting model is showing us, but also to develop targets and different best-case scenarios for what we think our forecast or budget should be,” Marlena says, “giving the salespeople and business unit leaders goals and targets to attain for that year.”
• Plans come back clean and by the deadline:  A template goes out in one standard shape and comes back, on time, the same way, governed from start to finish. “Planful gives us the capability of locking scenarios when we have deadlines, so we get something back on time that helps our C-suite make really good decisions,” Marlena says.

“Time is the biggest thing with a lean team,” Marlena says. The hours FP&A gains by using Planful go straight to the work that matters.

The clearest example comes at forecast time. Once business unit leaders turn in their templates, the executive team wants an initial roll-up.

“In five minutes, everything’s there,” Marlena says. “We don’t have to spend days combining different Excel files.”

The speed also shows up in financial reviews. A question from leadership once meant pulling Excel files and promising to follow up later. Now the answer is already in Planful.

“I can have that pivot table ready, and we’re able to do things on the fly,” Marlena says. “When you’re in a financial meeting, you can help those decision makers make a decision faster without having to wait on anything.”

That responsiveness has moved finance to the center of how Hourigan plans. The team sets the targets and scenarios the company builds its year around.