Macrospect Helps Global Beauty Products Company Improve Capital Planning and Spending Visibility Using SAP

Overview

With over 30 brands in 150 countries, the world’s sixth-largest maker of prestige cosmetic, fragrance, skin and hair care products operates at a global scale that requires disciplined financial planning and careful oversight of capital investments across brands and regions.

Tracking, planning, and reconciling more than 5,000 capital projects per year in Excel spreadsheets made it challenging to maintain visibility into spending and evaluate the return on individual projects. Strategic planning processes were disconnected from budgeting, and reconciling plan versus actual capital spending required significant manual effort.

The company partnered with Macrospect to implement a more structured and transparent capital planning process using SAP for Planning as a foundation for its future S/4HANA environment.

Business Challenge

The company’s legacy planning environment made it difficult for leadership to evaluate the effectiveness of individual capital investments across brands and regions.

Key challenges included:

• Limited ability to determine return on investment for individual projects
• Budgeting data not structured for strategic planning
• Strategic planning processes disconnected from budgeting processes
• Inexact reconciliation of plan versus actual capital project data
• Time-consuming spreadsheet maintenance with limited analytics and reporting

The organization needed a more structured planning environment that would provide accurate project-level insight while reducing reliance on manual spreadsheet processes.

Solution

Macrospect implemented SAP for Planning to create a structured capital planning and reporting environment aligned with the company’s financial planning processes.

Macrospect worked with stakeholders to identify root causes and align business processes with the SAP planning model, enabling a more disciplined and transparent approach to capital planning.

The solution enabled the company to:

• Plan capital spending by brand and geographic region
• Capture plan versus actual spending automatically for each capital project
• Provide executives with better visibility into project-level financial performance
• Strengthen analytics and monthly reporting capabilities
• Reduce manual spreadsheet maintenance

The new planning framework also helped the organization reduce unplanned or ‘maverick’ spending by providing clearer insight into capital project approvals and spending levels.

Business Outcomes

With SAP Planning implemented by Macrospect, the company gained significantly stronger visibility into capital spending and strengthened the discipline of its capital planning processes.

Finance leaders can now evaluate capital investments with more reliable data and clearer reporting, enabling better oversight of project performance across the organization.

Key outcomes include:

• Improved visibility into capital spending and project ROI
• Reduced reliance on manual spreadsheet processes
• Better reporting and analytics for executive decision-making
• More disciplined capital project approval and monitoring
• Reduced maverick spending across the organization

The project also established an important foundation for the company’s broader technology roadmap as it began its transition toward SAP S/4HANA.