Tioxide: Computerization—The key to the future in financial planning

Tioxide: Computerization—The key to the future in financial planning

102 Long Range Planning, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 102 to 105, 1985 Printed in Great Britain 002&6301/85 $3.00 + .OO Pergamon Press Ltd. Tioxide: Compute...

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102

Long Range Planning, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 102 to 105, 1985 Printed in Great Britain

002&6301/85 $3.00 + .OO Pergamon Press Ltd.

Tioxide: Computerization The Key to the Future in Financial Planning Peter Benford,

Tioxide

Group Headquarters,

As the capability of new computer systems becomes increasingly sophisticated, so does the application of computer techniques to financial and strategic planning become more relevant to management. Planning and practically all forms of decision-making are concerned with the future, which necessarily is uncertain and therefore difficult to plan for. Forecasting methods, however, can suggest trends and it is possible to reduce the number of possible futures to a manageable number, in effect, creating scenarios. But the viewing of multiple scenarios in a manual accounting system is impractical, given the sheer volume of work, and this is where the facilities offered by computerization can assist decisionmaking greatly. The case study illustrated here concerns a multinational company with production facilities in seven different countries, using a sophisticated financial software package for strategic and financial planning applications. The article traces the development of Tioxide’s association with a financial modelling package, Planmaster, from initial use on a time-sharing basis to the changes in hardware manufacture which made it possible to run what is essentially a mainframe program on the desk-top microcomputer of the planning department.

Introduction Financial planning is the bridge between the corporate strategy and the company’s treasurers. It requires inputs from the main operating functions, not necessarily in money terms, but it will always express the result of the strategy in financial terms. However, the consideration of money alone will frequently fail to ensure that resources appear and that tasks are accomplished on schedule. It is important that the financial organization of a company should not regard its work in isolation but that corporate motivation should be inherent in financial planning. Financial planners should appreciate that planning and control activities,

The author is financial planner Stratton Street, London.

at Tioxide

Group

Headquarters

in

London,

U.K.

including budgeting, control transfer pricing, are effective context of the interests of the whole.

information only within organization

and the as a

However, the perennial problem of financial planning is its proximity to the issues, and presentation of these issues; there is a serious danger that accountants and planners become so absorbed in the mechanics of organizing and preparing budgets and forecasts that they lose sight of the wood amongst the trees. The fine edges of judgment and experience are all too often blunted by the rigours of methodology, so that analysis and evaluation of corporate forecasts suffer as a result. warns against the dangers of Alan Robson’ accountants viewing the preparation and evaluation of budgets as being primarily exercises in processing paper-work. As financial lanning becomes more complex in response to t r: e pressures of modern business, the benefits of computerization become more attractive. Increasingly, the sophisticated capability of new systems has brought computers out of the category of labour-saving devices, giving them a new value in their own right as evaluation tools. Computer-assisted planning models help to provide a more comprehensively analytical basis for the corporate strategic process, thereby broadening the scope and enhancing the quality of strategic choice. The areas of financial planning are ripe to benefit from computerization, yet it is sad that the methodology of the systems for underlying computer-assisted planning and the nature of outputs which they can produce are not widely understood. This example will endeavour to make clear these methodological foundations and, by show the difficulties and means of comparison,

Tioxide:

Computerization-The

drawbacks of manual systems-and computerized accounting systems-in comprehensive analysed basis for strategic process.

indeed, some providing a the corporate

Tioxide Group plc is a leading international producer of titanium pigments, with manufacturing facilities in the U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia and South Africa, and a share in a company mining ilmenite (a raw material) in Australia. Titanium pigments are sold to industrial companies mainly for use in the production of paints, plastics, paper, rubber, fibres and cosmetics. In 1930, several companies, including the current shareholders of the Tioxide Group, formed a new private limited company to make titanium dioxide pigments at Billingham on Teesside. This company, called British Titan Products Company Ltd., was the forerunner of the Tioxide Group. Today there are over 35 companies manufacturing titanium dioxide in more than 20 countries and total world production has risen to over 2 million tonnes a year. The Tioxide Group is jointly owned by ICI and Cooksons, and, with annual sales of over A330m and some 4500 employees, it is one of the largest producers of titanium pigments in the world. But, being based largely on one capital-intensive product and with its production facilities and resources spread worldwide, the efficiency of the planning operation is extremely important to the financial well-being of the company. Tioxide illustrates the case for computerized financial planning because of its multinational business with widespread sources of raw materials, and its size. The subsidiaries account independently to the Group for consolidation. Tioxide uses different types of models within the Group, for a variety of purposes. Major investments are evaluated in isolation to determine whether they are profitable; on occasion, linear programming is used to optimize production levels at individual plants. Additionally, there is a need to see what the Group would look like in terms of profits and financial situations by alternative investment or disinvestment strategies. Tioxide sought a financial planning model which would allow the integration of all these aspects on the level of ‘what if?’ scenarios, as well as permitting planning department staff to report the results in normal accounting terms without that the disruption was anticipated from computerization.

Choosing

a Solution

The system chosen specialist company

was Planmaster, in Beaconsfield,

from a small Planmaster

Key to the Future

in Financial

Planning

103

Systems Ltd., which came to the attention of Tioxide in the mid-1970s. Prior to this, the central planning department would either prepare forecasts for the local companies or commission them from the subsidiary companies. The initial version of these forecasts would represent a base case against which subsequent forecasts and variations could be compared. The sheer effort of consolidating all these variations led the planners at Tioxide to select a strategic planning system which would not only consolidate group and company figures at a faster and less expensive rate than the manual system, but would also be able to perform consolidations in different currencies. Planmaster was chosen because it was designed for just these multi-currency consolidations. It also facilitated the handling of inter-company transactions, such as dividends to the parent company and royalties to the U.K. operating company. At the time, it was about the only software package with these abilities. Other systems have emulated Planmaster on consolidations, but Planmaster does have other facilities, for example, the ability to calculate interest on surplus cash or overdrafts, which Tioxide finds useful. The Planmaster system has been tailored to suit Tioxide’s requirements exactly. Different aspects of financial planning are of importance to companies at different times. For example, tax computations can be updated and refined when necessary. Additionally, these varying priorities meant that the system chosen would have to be ‘userfriendly’-easily understood and operated by the user-to facilitate the accurate reflection of changing priorities in the final results. To pursue the example of tax computation, Tioxide could use the Planmaster model to assess the tax benefits of holding a subsidiary either directly from the U.K. or through another, perhaps foreign, subsidiary. Tax can absorb a substantial proportion of pre-tax cash flow and this underlines the importance of modelling the computations fairly accurately-not only those of local companies but also in the past the taxation of dividends received in the U.K. from abroad, especially when the local tax rate was less than 52 per cent. This user-friendliness is a key feature in the introduction of computerized accounts and planning and, to a certain extent, hostility to computerization is derived from the idea that it represents a drastic departure from the accustomed practice. There are no radically different protocols to be learnt. Planmaster allows the presentation of documents and forecasts to be made in standard accounting formats-a fact which is of significance to planning departments preparing reports for a board of directors or for banks, who will be accustomed to receiving information in this form. For this reason, at the Group level, the forecasts closely mirror the standard financial statementsGroup Profit and Loss Account, Balance Sheet, and

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Source and Application of Funds. The Group report also has a Current Cost Accounting section; and there are similar reports for individual companies, closely based on the Group’s management accounting layouts. Planmaster does not provoke adverse reaction, being readily understandable and easily integrated with historical records, consequently it was possible for Tioxide’s report to be prepared on a comparable basis. Tioxide, for a number of years, used the system on a time-sharing basis, through one of the country’s larger bureaux. Despite the expense of such an exercise, the advantages were sufficiently rich for Tioxide to remain a time-sharing customer. For group forecasts, prepared using the manual system, Tioxide had permitted a timescale of about 6 manweeks; using Planmaster, the same could be accomplished in 1 man-week. However, the most outstanding advantage of the system lies not in numbers of man-weeks saved but in its ability to improve greatly the information available at the pre-decision stage. The ability to forecast results enabled Tioxide to look at many different options, and to look at more of them faster. It is a constraint of a manual system, that it is unable to assess different scenarios-changes in sales volumes, and the evolution of prices. It would be inordinately expensive and time-consuming to perform manually an investigation into the effects of including or excluding a possible acquisition for the company. It is the ability to adapt and react to rapid changes in economic conditions and violent moves in currency rates that is of major importance. Tioxide’s model allows for frequent reviews of the view of the future and for a number of scenarios to be tried out in dry dock, as it were. The system takes automatic account of the translation effects of currency changes, but it is necessary to think about their effect on prices and costs. Individual forecasts never turn out to be right; however, the act of thinking through forecasts will illustrate where management action is neededinevitable inaccuracies are catered for by forecasting three possible outcomes: pessimistic, mid-ca3e and optimistic. Using .the model, goal-seeking is facilitated in a realistic way, so that the planner can examine the effects of sensitivity analysis in related variables. For example, in order to achieve a larger profit, it is unrealistic to vary only the selling price of the product, for this, in itself, will usually have an effect on volume. Tioxide’s model allows them to take account of these inter-relationships, including inflation and currency exchange effects throughout the corporate organization. Investment and disin-

1985 vestment strategies can be measured against fluctuating currency rates in several countries, and the whole must be based on changing political situations as well as the world economic climate.

‘What If.

. . ?’

The economic fortunes of the titanium pigment business closely mirror each country’s business cycles. There is also a lengthy lead time between the authorization and commissioning of new plants. Inevitably, the introduction of a new plant sometimes coincides with a recession. This is what happened to Tioxide in 1980. Financial projections made at that time showed the company heading for some difficulties. However, all reasonable market forecasts could be (and have been) satisfied by closing the company’s original factory at Billingham. It was striking to see the difference between the future financial fortunes that the planning model showed-with and without that factory. A different example may serve to illustrate the if?’ scenario for model working out a ‘what investment strategy. The Group’s plant in Spain started (first production in 1977) as a joint venture with a Spanish chemical company, which then owned a 55 per cent share. In 1982, Tioxide had the opportunity to buy out its Spanish partner. The financial planning model was able to show the effect of converting the company to a wholly-owned subsidiary by little more than changing the data line representing the Group’s ownership, from 45 to 100 per cent. Professor C. C. Magee’ stresses that ‘comparisons of the financial results of individual investment decisions over time must be comprehensive, and that they can only be satisfactory if the individual finance results are regarded as an integral part of those produced by the operations of the whole enterprise’. In tackling this issue at Tioxide, we set out to simulate the profit and loss accounts of group companies using no more than 10 lines of data covering sales volume, prices and costs. These can be varied to show the effect on the company and the Group results. Although it may seem a limited number of data input lines, the model’s predicted results are extremely close to each company’s fully detailed budgets. To limit the number of input lines for the Profit and Loss accounts-although producing accurate results-is important when the outlook can be as far forward as 12 years: trivia should not be forecast that far in advance. This limited input data form the basis for a complex model; there are just over 600 lines of logic-and there are nearly 400 lines to calculate and report on individual company and Group forecast results. By 1983, the cost of operating on time sharing was such that it was possible to buy the hardware and the software licence for the same cost as 18 months’

Tioxide:

Computerization-The

Key to the Future

The development of the ‘super-micro’ has been made possible by the Motorola 68000 processor, which brought mainframe capability into the reach of the microcomputer, and has allowed hardware manufacturers to bridge a gap which had opened up between the capabilities of the computer systems and the software requirements of users. The WICAT range, in combination with Planmaster represents the answer to mainframe software, processing requirements, with the advantages of the desk-top machine, portability, economy and rapid access to results on the screen. the scheme

105

Planning

worthwhile but also operationally attractive compactness. Planmaster’s because of Traditionally, the weakest area of the vast majority of commercial machines where there are a large number of users is file access. The software minimizes this problem of winding large volumes of data into memory and back out again.

time sharing. It was the WICAT microcomputer which attracted Tioxide because their own mainframe could not handle software comparable to the Planmaster package.

For Tioxide,

in Financial

This compactness of file storage means that all of the facilities can be supported by the WICAT-not merely a ‘slimmed down’ micro version.

References (1) A. P. Robson in Handbook

ofFinancial

Planning

and Control,

Pocock and Taylor, pp. 5-l 9, Gower, Aldershot (1983). (2) C. C. Magee, see Ref. 7, pp. 145-163.

was not only financially

Appendix I

1 I

!

Tioxide Group Plc (Holding Co.)

I I I

I I 100% Subsidiaries 1 1 Tioxide France I-{

I : I I

Pigment Operations

I 1 Tioxide Espana 1 I Pigment I-: Operations 1 I ’ Tioxide

(U.K.) Ltd. Pigment, etc. Operations, Central Services Inc. Group R & D (100%)

I _____-_--Tioxide ltalia I I Pigment :’ ,

Operations I__-------_I

7

I

I i

I1-1I

I

I ’ I I II I

I I

Tioxide Canada Pigment Operations

:

I 1

Tioxide Australia Pigment Operations, Holds

I

I BTP South

:A i I

Figure

1. Tioxide

Group

plc corporate

structure

Africa-Holds 1..:

1 ; 1 ’ I I

1 I

!i

, I

1

40% Westralian Sands, Australian Mining

60% South African Titan Products. Pigment Operations

1

I

1 1 1 I

Eds