Clash of Plans: How Supercell reimagined planning and helped drive business results

With Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager · Supercell

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"You need a tool that is very flexible and easy to adapt and react to unforeseen circumstances, and for us now it’s very easy to open Pigment and build different scenarios."

Lauri Sulonen

FP&A Manager

Lauri Sulonen

FP&A Manager

Number of employees

100-1,000

Used by

Executive team, Finance (Accounting, FP&A and Investments), Marketing Product teams, HR Recruiting

Headquarters

Helsinki, Finland

Industry

Technology

Use cases

FP&A
P&L Reporting and Analysis
Scenario and P&L Planning
Headcount Planning
Opex/Expenses Planning
Game KPIs
Official Accounting & Standards
Cash Flow Forecasting (in implementation)

Implementation time

4 Months (Financial Planning & Data Hub)

Integrations with

Databricks, Netsuite, Sympa

Replacing

At a glance

With no EPM tool in place, finance faced significant challenges with planning managed in Excel and Google Sheets, causing issues with version control, access silos, and inefficiencies.
With objectives to reduce manual work and drive business results, Pigment became a central tool for the company, integrating financial planning, forecasting and headcount planning.
Pigment allowed finance to quickly adapt to unexpected situations by simulating potential plans and re-forecasting foreseeable revenue.

Supercell is one of the largest mobile game developers in the world, based in Helsinki, Finland. It is a global leader in mobile gaming, known for hit titles like Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars.

As the FP&A Manager at Supercell, Lauri Sulonen plays a key role in financial planning, reporting and data vizualisation, and managing systems, including Pigment. Lauri drives FP&A at a group level, which takes into account their live game teams as well as their support organisations.

Game over, Excel

With no EPM tool, Supercell was managing planning in Excel and Google Sheets - facing challenges with version control, access silos, and inefficiencies. More critically, the company’s headcount planning and financial planning processes were not integrated, making it difficult to tie the resources available to the company’s game development goals and creating a lack of transparency across the business.

“For us a big issue was visibility. For example, department leaders like the Head of IT or Head of Legal often struggled to answer what should be fundamental, simple questions such as ‘how much am I spending?’ and ‘am I investing in the right areas?’ As a finance team we lacked a streamlined way of providing this clarity, making it difficult for decision-makers to track and control costs effectively.”
Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

Their primary objectives were to reduce manual work required to manage financial models in Excel and to help drive concrete business results. Lauri also shared an example of the stark contrast between before and after Pigment.

“It took 2 days for 4 people to update our large P&L spreadsheet - used for actuals and forecasting - and after going live with Pigment in 4 months, once the actuals were ready, those same updates took me 4 minutes to complete.”
Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

From gaming to gaining

After evaluating other EPM providers, including Adaptive, Board, Jedox, and Anaplan, Supercell became the first company in Finland to implement Pigment, and Lauri played a pivotal role in its adoption and integration. Pigment stood out for several reasons:

Flexibility
Appealing UI and UX
Ease of use
Ability to integrate with their IT landscape
Scalability
Datamodel

But what really solidified their decision was Pigment being business-owned and managed, allowing them to maintain, develop models and dashboards self-sufficiently.

Lauri has built Boards accessible to all relevant leaders in the company, allowing them to track real-time performance.

“I have to say, I find Pigment’s speed of product development impressive. They are constantly innovating and improving product capabilities.”
Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

Pigment’s Snapshots feature, which allows you to freeze your model at a specific point in time and reference the data later, is being used to present in most company-wide performance updates given by leadership, and similarly for the finance team’s quarterly meetings, which take place utilising Pigment almost exclusively.

Simulating in the real world

The team built tools within Pigment that seamlessly connected their financial and personnel planning, allowing for a more cohesive and efficient planning process. Pigment became a central tool for the company, integrating everything from financial forecasting to recruitment tracking.

“Now that we have implemented Pigment, it’s much more self-serving for people in the business to access the data on their own, giving us all one source of truth. But we don’t see Pigment as just an FP&A tool, it’s a planning and analysis tool for the whole company.”
Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

Towards the end of 2023, while building annual plans for each of Supercell’s games, the team identified that Brawl Stars was showing monthly active users and revenue trending down.

Suddenly, entering 2024, both metrics skyrocketed. In the first two months, they had generated the revenue forecasted for the entire year, causing ‘a positive problem’ for the team. Their annual plan was already outdated and the planned forecast update due in April had to be brought forward to February. FP&A team was able to quickly create various Scenarios within Pigment, allowing them to provide a more accurate revenue forecast.

“You need a tool that is very flexible and easy to adapt and react to unforeseen circumstances, and for us now it’s very easy to open Pigment and build different scenarios.”
Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

Levelling up

Since going live with Pigment in September 2023, Supercell has achieved several key results, including:

Unified financial and personnel planning: Pigment’s ability to link headcount and financial planning allowed Supercell to align resources with company goals. This integration ensured that the company could meet its game development and business targets more effectively.
Rapid re-forecasting capabilities: When Brawl Stars experienced a sudden surge in user activity and revenue, Supercell was able to re-forecast in days rather than weeks. With Pigment, FP&A team quickly tested different scenarios, adjusted their cash flow, and made critical business decisions.
Improved operational efficiency: The flexibility and adaptability of Pigment helped FP&A team avoid the classic inefficiencies of spreadsheets. As the system grew organically within the company, Pigment became indispensable for various functions, including recruitment and resource planning.
Self-service planning: Pigment’s user-friendliness allowed team members across the company to access planning tools independently, reducing the need for manual inputs and providing real-time insights.

Advice for other businesses

Lauri encourages companies considering Pigment to focus on simplicity and adaptability. The key is to create a single source of truth that everyone in the organization can rely on. He advises against overcomplicating models and instead suggests focusing on how to create a system that evolves with the company’s needs. By doing so, businesses can actively shape their future, rather than just reporting on the past.

“Keep it simple. Start with the basics and build out your capabilities over time. Don’t overcomplicate your models from the beginning. Also, invest in training your team so they can take ownership of the tool.”
Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

Entering the agentic era

As a member of the private preview program, Supercell enjoyed early access to the Analyst Agent. And they've achieved a lot with it already.

“The Analyst Agent feels like an extra team member, taking care of the heavy lifting so we can focus on what matters most. We’ve been using it to analyze P&L expense lines, compare actuals to forecast and to the same period last year, and quickly surface the biggest variances to share with leadership and 30 department leads. What used to take a week now takes minutes, freeing us up to focus on deeper analysis and the value-added work we actually enjoy.”

Yanxin Hämäläinen, Finance Business Partner

What's even more encouraging is that they've been able to do so without any direct AI expertise within the team.

"It’s also incredibly easy to set up and start using. If you needed to be an AI expert to make this work, it wouldn’t be valuable, but it's something regular teams can pick up and drive results with. With more experimentation and the support of Pigment’s broader suite of agents, we see real potential to unlock new insights, automate deeper drill-downs, and enable smarter, more contextual reporting across the business."

Lauri Sulonen, FP&A Manager, Supercell

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