“By integrating the different levels of our budget process, we can now create budgets for individual cruises and define more accurate long-term plans. We can also develop models and pervasive budgets that provide better insight on our business drivers and variables.

The software has also greatly simplified the complexity of managing voyage-related variables. Built-in features, such as a perfect audit trail, have significantly reduced the time we need for routine activities that don’t add value to our business.  As a result, we have more time to focus on analyzing critical data.” Aldo Bressan - Budgeting & Forecasting Director at Costa Crociere

The challenge

As the #1 cruise company in Europe, Costa Cruises is committed to maintaining and strengthen its competitive advantage. In 2009, the company set a new record in the European cruise industry for carrying 1,300,000 passengers. In addition, it will expand its fleet from 14 to 16 ships with total guest capacity of approximately 45,000 by 2012.

In order to manage this growth effectively, the group requires fast and flexible insight on its complete business. In the past, however, creating accurate budgets and forecasts for individual cruises in light of multiple voyage-related variables (e.g. vessel, area, route, currency impact, and price effect) was no easy task.

As a result, the company decided to replace its existing system based on the old release of the Tagetik solution (budgeting), Easy Services (reporting tool and repository for budgeting and forecasting) and Cognos Power Play (enterprise reporting) with a unified solution for Corporate Performance Management.

Objectives

After reviewing various solutions available in the market, Costa Crociere selected Tagetik 3.0 because it wanted to reduce the complexity of its IT infrastructure. In addition to streamlining its budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes, the solution automatically loads data from seven different applications ranging from ERP and industry specific solutions. Besides automating many manual processes and improving its reporting and analysis capabilities, Costa Crociere also chose Tagetik because its business users would be actively involved in the data-entry process and could create reports themselves at anytime.

Costa Crociere started the project with the budgeting module, which has been implemented from May through October 2009. Towards the end of this first phase, the team also started to work on the forecasting module, to be rolled out by December2009– just in time for the first monthly close of the new fiscal year.

Benefits:

With the implementation of Tagetik 3.0, Costa Crociere can now:

• Analyze its world wide actual data weekly. This has improved the accuracy of the forecasts as well as the synergies between its P & A department and the rest of the business.
• Create a dynamic model that uses special statistics (i.e. pax cruise days) to recalculate costs and revenues in its management reports. This also helps improving the quality of forecasting.
• Assess trends more efficiently by analyzing different views.
  

Results

Using Tagetik 3.0, 70 users throughout the world can flexibly manage the company’s massive volumes of data in just 12-15 dimensions. In addition to creating more precise budgets and forecasts, users can also analyze summary data by geographical area and itineraries as well as detailed data on the over 50  annual cruises for each of its 14 ships in 27 different currencies. 

To add more transparency, the new solution also contains an executive management book containing a total of 500 pages or 37 reports. Each scenario contains about 2.5 million records. The system currently supports 40 million records online and will grow to approximately 150 million records by 2014.

Since switching to Tagetik 3.0, Costa Crociere can manage its processes more efficiently and easily. Thanks to the better controls during the data collection process, the solution has significantly reduced amount of manual tasks so users have more time for analysis and other activities that add value to the business.

In addition, users can also add new reports to the executive management book in just two days – a process which used to take a week with the old system.   
The quality of the data has improved significantly thanks to the new solution. Users can easily analyze variances or track the origins and effects of any change to their budget data.

In the next phases of the project, Costa Crociere plans to roll out the solution to its Spanish cruise brand Ibero Cruceros and add functionality for strategic and financial planning.

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