From my experience working with manufacturing organisations, crises rarely arrive without warning. By the time they appear in reported results, the underlying issues have often been developing for months. Volatility exposes planning weaknesses quickly, and FP&A is usually where the pressure shows first. Forecasts lose reliability, decision-making slows, and teams spend more time reconciling numbers than guiding actions.
In practice, most manufacturers are not unprepared. They are overloaded. Planning processes absorb time and effort but struggle to reflect fast-changing conditions, making it harder to see where risk is building and which decisions really matter.
Operational assumptions often sit in separate systems, spreadsheets, or local models. Finance consolidates results after the fact rather than working with the same operational drivers in real time. When volatility increases, the gaps between those plans become more visible.
Many manufacturers are now addressing this by connecting operational and financial planning. When planning becomes connected, FP&A gains the visibility and speed needed to guide decisions under pressure.
The following six examples show how manufacturers and industrial organisations strengthened FP&A by connecting planning across their businesses.
For global automotive supplier Aptiv, excess and obsolete (E&O) inventory planning had become fragmented across sites. Each location maintained its own data and assumptions, making it difficult for central teams to understand risk or take timely action. Planning relied on data extracts and local spreadsheets, with significant effort spent consolidating and validating data rather than addressing issues.
By implementing a connected planning approach, E&O inventory was centralised into a single model. Sites contributed directly, while central finance and operations teams gained a unified, trusted view of inventory risk.
The impact was immediate. Risks surfaced earlier, manual effort reduced, and conversations shifted from validating numbers to making decisions. FP&A gained a clearer view of working capital exposure and could support more proactive inventory management.
For the European recycled paper mills division of a FTSE 100 global packaging manufacturer, planning relied heavily on fragmented Excel models that produced slow cycles and quickly outdated forecasts. As commodity volatility increased, particularly across energy and raw materials, FP&A lacked the visibility and speed needed to respond effectively.
The business needed to move beyond high-level assumptions towards planning that reflected operational reality. This meant gaining real-time visibility, accelerating forecasting cycles, and enabling scenario modelling at a granular level across mills and production assets.
Using Anaplan as its connected planning platform, the organisation integrated financial and operational drivers into a single model. A driver-based approach enabled detailed scenario modelling of energy consumption, production volumes and cost inputs, with immediate visibility of financial impact.
The result was a step change in decision-making. The business can now rapidly test and compare scenarios, understanding the impact of energy and commodity changes on cost and margin in real time. Planning is faster, more accurate and far more responsive, enabling confident decisions in volatile conditions.
Lumag, a global manufacturer of braking components for commercial vehicles, needed greater visibility into product and customer profitability.
Like many manufacturers, planning relied heavily on spreadsheets and fragmented financial models. As the organisation grew, this made it difficult for FP&A to explain margin performance or understand which products were driving profit.
By implementing an integrated planning environment, Lumag connected operational drivers with financial planning models. Revenue forecasts, cost drivers and profitability analysis could now be evaluated within a single system.
The result was a much clearer understanding of profitability across the business. Finance could move beyond consolidating spreadsheets and focus on analysing results and supporting strategic decisions.
Fever-Tree operates across more than 75 countries, requiring tight coordination between demand, supply and financial planning. Previously, planning processes were fragmented, making it difficult to maintain a consistent view of future demand and stock requirements.
By implementing Anaplan as its connected planning platform, Fever-Tree integrated demand planning, supply planning and financial forecasting into a single process. Planning cycles that once took days or weeks could now be completed in minutes. More importantly, forecast accuracy improved because all teams were working from the same assumptions and a single version of the truth.
This enabled leadership to make faster, more confident decisions across production, inventory and financial planning.
Unilever International operates across a vast global network, connecting sourcing, logistics and commercial operations across more than 150 countries. Coordinating planning at this scale presents significant complexity, particularly when balancing customer service, cost and operational efficiency.
Using Anaplan as its connected planning platform, Unilever connected finance and supply chain planning across the organisation. Planning cycles that once took up to 45 days were reduced to four days, with some activities completed in minutes. The organisation also leveraged advanced data integration and AI-driven modelling to analyse large volumes of data at scale.
Connected planning enabled teams across the enterprise to work from the same assumptions, improving alignment, speed and decision quality.
Although these organisations operate in different manufacturing environments, their experiences reveal a consistent pattern. When planning is fragmented, FP&A teams spend most of their time consolidating data and explaining past performance.
When planning becomes connected, finance gains the visibility and speed needed to influence decisions earlier.
Across these examples, several outcomes appear repeatedly:
Forecast cycles become dramatically faster
Scenario planning becomes practical during volatility
Operational and financial assumptions remain aligned
Finance eliminates time spent reconciling spreadsheets
Leaders gain clearer insight into operational trade-offs
In other words, FP&A moves from explaining performance to shaping outcomes.
Many manufacturing organisations assume their planning processes are robust until volatility begins to test them. The real question is not whether FP&A exists. It is whether FP&A can keep pace when operational conditions change rapidly.
Before launching major transformation programmes, or investing in new planning platforms, many organisations start with the simple step of assessing where their planning capabilities currently stand.
Our FP&A maturity assessment can help identify:
If the patterns described here feel familiar, the risk may already be forming inside your planning process. Take the FP&A Self-Assessment to understand where your organisation stands today.
Or if you would prefer a conversation, talk to me about the planning challenges that concern you most. Often the first step toward stronger planning is simply seeing the problem more clearly.