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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Looking ahead, Lauri sees AI as a powerful tool for further enhancing productivity at Supercell. While AI is already transforming game development, Lauri views AI’s potential in FP&A as a productivity booster. With Pigment, Lauri anticipates AI will help simplify workflows and provide a productivity boost, enabling faster decision-making across the company.

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.

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