Leadec
Case Study
Discover how Leadec, a global leader in industrial services, streamlined its FP&A function with Apliqo UX. Oliver Völker, Teamlead BI Applications, shares how replacing fragmented reporting tools and manual planning processes with a single, intuitive platform empowered finance teams to deliver faster, more consistent insights and reduce reliance on IT.
Leadec
The world's leading service specialist for the entire lifecycle of a factory, supporting manufacturing industries across installation, automation, maintenance, logistics, and facility management.
Verwendete Produkte
Apliqo UX
Lösungen
Financial Reporting, Management Reporting, Planning, Performance Management
Grösse
22,500 employees
Einnahmen
1.35 billion EUR (2025)
Oliver Völker
Team Manager Global BI Applications, Leadec
Leadec is the world's leading service specialist for the entire lifecycle of a factory, operating across more than 380 locations in 16 countries and four continents. With around 22,500 employees supporting manufacturing customers across installation, automation, maintenance, and facility management, the demands on Leadec's finance function are substantial.
When Oliver Völker joined Leadec seven years ago, his mandate was to design a new analytics and reporting system from the ground up. Over the years, that journey grew into a comprehensive global programme to implement and expand planning and analytics capabilities using IBM Planning Analytics and Apliqo UX. This case study covers a key chapter of that journey: the transformation of Leadec's planning processes.
Planning across multiple business areas
Leadec's finance function supported three distinct planning applications: one for business finance covering P&L, one for operations covering gross profit and gross margin, and one for holding controlling covering cost centres. All three were built on web sheets backed by Excel-based uploads. The process was slow to support, required significant manual effort, and was difficult to maintain and scale across a globally distributed organisation.
Speed and usability
The web sheet and cube combination underpinning the old setup was slow, creating frustration for users and limiting the pace at which planning cycles could run. The team was small relative to the demands placed on it, which made it critical to find a way to reduce the manual burden and empower business users to work more independently.
IT dependency and self-service gap
The BI team was responsible for a high volume of configuration and support work that ideally should have been handled directly by controlling and finance staff. The goal was to shift toward a self-service model where business users could run their own reporting, publish outputs, and work with dashboards without routing requests through the BI team.
Apliqo UX was implemented alongside IBM Planning Analytics, replacing the three separate web sheet-based planning applications with a unified, centrally managed solution. A key achievement was the design of a template-based approach built on a central cube, into which all inputs and parameters, including process timelines, budget periods, and forecast cycles, are fed. Once configured, the process runs automatically, generating reports for each application with the correct reference structures and columns.
The migration to Apliqo UX also enabled Leadec to take advantage of CSV upload functionality, further streamlining data input and reducing manual steps. The result was a significantly faster, more automated planning environment that gave the business the speed and reliability it needed, particularly during high-pressure periods such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when rapid scenario planning became essential.
The transformation delivered meaningful improvements across Leadec's planning and reporting function. Planning processes that previously relied on slow, manually maintained web sheets now run faster and with greater consistency. The central cube and template architecture reduced the complexity of ongoing support, freeing up the BI team to focus on higher-value work.
Business users gained the ability to run their own reporting, publish outputs, and interact with dashboards directly, realising the self-service vision that had driven the project from the start. The planning environment is now better equipped to respond quickly to changing business conditions, as demonstrated during COVID-19 when the business needed to model scenarios rapidly and Apliqo was already in place to support it.
