Case Study: Largest Fast Food Restaurant achieves a one-week faster G&A budget close with Vena Solutions

Serving Up More Efficient General & Administrative Budgeting

One of the world’s largest fast-food chains (1,400 restaurants, 80,000 employees) struggled with an inefficient G&A budgeting process: Finance emailed and collected 90 Excel templates from ~30 managers, manually uploaded data into Oracle Essbase, and spent excessive overtime reconciling and consolidating results. Management wanted a solution that kept Excel’s flexibility but added web collaboration, embedded workflow and centralized control with minimal user training.

They implemented Vena, keeping the familiar Excel interface while adding centralized templates, business rules, web submissions, dashboards and vendor support. The Finance team now finishes budgeting a week earlier, consolidates templates faster, reduces errors and overtime, enjoys high user adoption and real-time workflow tracking, and is expanding Vena’s use beyond G&A.