Smollan cuts budget cycles from months to weeks with IDU.

Founded in 1931 as a regional sales agency, Smollan has grown into a global retail solutions company, operating across five continents with over 60,000 employees. The group delivers growth for retailers and brand owners through field sales, retail execution, activation, and technology — a strategic partnership with WPP since 2009 has further extended its international reach. At that scale, financial planning is not a back-office exercise. It is an operational challenge in its own right — which is why Smollan turned to IDU.

With more than 20 companies, 7,000 employees, and over 22,000 outlets to service, Smollan's cost centre managers carried an outsized administrative burden at budget time. The group ran its financials through an AS/400-based BPCS ERP — a reliable system, but not one built for the hands of field managers. Extracting accounts required complex procedures, and the gap between BPCS and the real world was filled with spreadsheets — iterative, error-prone, and impossible to consolidate at Smollan's scale. Cost centre managers spent more time reconciling figures at their desks than driving retail execution in the field — the work they were hired to do. Reporting deadlines slipped. The finance team absorbed the strain of consolidating figures manually. Transparency was thin, accountability difficult to trace, and the budgeting cycle stretched across months that the business could not afford to lose.

In 2001, Smollan deployed IDU-Concept to sit alongside BPCS rather than displace it — stripping out the spreadsheet layer without disrupting the ERP infrastructure Smollan already depended on. The iterative, error-prone work of reconciling spreadsheets gave way to a single, structured environment where managers could capture and report budgets with clarity. Each manager accessed only their own cost centres, with the interface handling security and accountability at the point of entry.

The centrepiece of the deployment was not a standard configuration. IDU built a custom aggregation tool specifically for Smollan — purpose-designed to consolidate thousands of smaller budgets into a coherent whole without the manual effort that had previously fallen to the finance team. As Kevin Phillips, CEO of IDU, put it: "Smollan needed a solution that could handle thousands of budgets without slowing them down. By tailoring IDU-Concept with a custom aggregation tool, we delivered transparency, accountability, and efficiency at scale."

Web access completed the picture. Managers could update financials and pull reports from anywhere — no desk required — and remain active in the field.

Budget cycles that had stretched across months shortened to weeks. Managers who had previously been pulled from the field to reconcile spreadsheets could now capture and review financials from wherever the work took them — web access meant financial accountability no longer required a desk. The custom aggregation tool handled the consolidation of thousands of individual budgets without burdening the finance team, a task that had previously consumed significant manual effort at every cycle. Productivity increased across the organisation, and field managers remained where Smollan needed them most.

"IDU‑Concept revolutionised our budgeting process. Management is now actively involved in planning while still focusing on the field. Productivity has increased considerably, and managers can access reports anytime, anywhere."

— Colleen Rose, IT Director, Smollan Group