How Marshall Fleet Solutions shifted the role of FP&A from basic budgeting & forecasting to true financial performance management.

IBM Business Analytics Solution – IBM Planning Analytics

Services – Consultancy

About Thermo King UK

Founded in 1972, Thermo King UK, (previously known as Marshall Fleet Solutions) is the UK’s largest independent refrigeration, tail lift and commercial vehicle fleet service and support organisation. The business supports more than 2,500 vehicles and operates a diverse model covering sales, installation, maintenance, parts and fleet management.

During the pandemic, Marshall Fleet Solutions played a vital role in supporting supermarkets and logistics providers to deliver food and medical supplies. As the business has grown, it has continued to innovate, launching a renewables division focused on green diesel and solar technologies within the refrigerated vehicle market.

The Challenge

Marshall Fleet Solutions’ expanding and multifaceted business model made financial planning and analysis increasingly complex. While spreadsheets had supported budgeting and forecasting in the past, they were becoming a major constraint. The budget model alone contained more than 50 tabs with hundreds of columns in each. Even opening the file took several minutes, and making changes required copying data across multiple sheets. The effort involved meant that as soon as one quarterly forecast was completed, work on the next one had to begin almost immediately.

As the business continued to grow and diversify, the FP&A team wanted to move beyond basic budgeting and forecasting towards a more sophisticated approach to financial performance management.

The Solution

Marshall Fleet Solutions was introduced to Aramar through its parent and sister companies, which were already using IBM Business Analytics software for financial reporting. Following a demonstration of Fast Financials, Aramar’s out-of-the-box solution built on IBM Planning Analytics, Marshall quickly recognised the potential.

Aramar worked closely with Marshall Fleet Solutions to deploy Fast Financials and tailor it to align with the company’s IT security and GDPR requirements. Alongside the implementation, Aramar delivered several days of modelling training, enabling the FP&A team to become self-sufficient quickly.

The Results

Within two months, Marshall Fleet Solutions had its data loaded into IBM Planning Analytics and was using the system productively. The FP&A team began migrating more spreadsheet-based processes and calculations into Fast Financials, laying the foundations for extensive automation.

“Shifting from our manual spreadsheet-based processes to Fast Financials has been a learning process, and Aramar have given us all the support we needed,” said Bryan. “Instead of spending all our time extracting and wrangling information, we’ve been able to focus on developing and improving our workflows.”

The benefits became clear quickly. Where forecasting previously meant repeating the same manual effort every quarter, automation now means that work only needs to be done once.

“With Fast Financials, once the automations are set up, that’s the last time we’ll ever need to do it,” Bryan added.

After two months, the team confidently completed its first 9+3 forecast in the new system. Since then, Marshall Fleet Solutions has expanded its use of Planning Analytics to include new capabilities such as a gross margin cube, enabling faster and more detailed sales analysis.

The Outcome

Beyond time savings, the biggest impact has been the shift in how FP&A supports the business. IBM Planning Analytics has enabled Marshall Fleet Solutions to provide faster visibility of targets, budgets and actuals, and to move towards a rolling forecast model.

“As we move towards rolling forecasts, we’re shifting the role of FP&A from basic budgeting and forecasting to true financial performance management,” said Bryan. “We’re raising the focus from ‘where will the numbers be?’ to ‘how can we plan the business to better serve our customers?’”