Car and motorcycle manufacturer Honda Motor Europe is using business performance management software to monitor its financial budgeting and planning processes more accurately.

The European arm of the Japanese giant is responsible for buying parts and finished vehicles from its factories, and selling them on to subsidiaries across Europe.

The company wanted to improve its financial capabilities and move away from basic Microsoft Excel-based processes.

It is using financial planning software from vendor Hyperion to generate better and more accurate forecasting scenarios, says Andy Smith, Honda Motor Europe systems development manager.

'There was also growing budget complexity, which was difficult to meet because of the largely manual processes involved,' he said. 'For example, we couldn't compare actual sales against budget easily.'

The ageing spreadsheet system was time-consuming and had no way of automatically querying data on unit sales, revenue, cost-of-sales, gross and operating profits, and other costs or expenses. Managers also had to undertake the manually intensive process of collating individual reports.

Smith says the company has been able to increase the number of regular annual budget events to include several 'what if' scenarios for analysing sales, profit and loss data.

'It?s a very useful thing for a manager to be able to say: if sales move in that direction, this will be the effect on profit,' he said.

Smith says work is continuing on extending the software's level of automation and integrating actual data from Honda's SAP enterprise resource planning system, to gain a view of its consolidated profit.

'The profit on a particular car for the European head office will also make some profit for the country sales office that sold it, and for the factory that manufactured it,' said Smith.

'One of the strategic goals is to be able to understand the consolidated profit, which is the sum of those items.'