Rinnai Australia lays the groundwork for AI adoption with IBM Planning Analytics
Rinnai Australia, a leading manufacturer and distributor of heating, cooling and hot water systems, experienced significant growth through organic expansion and acquisitions. However, their finance function struggled to keep pace with this growth.
The company’s finance systems had become increasingly complex. Heavy reliance on multiple tools, such as IBM® Cognos®, IBM TM1®, Oracle Essbase and Oracle Analytics Cloud—combined with manual processes and numerous spreadsheets—created silos and duplication. This situation led to lengthy reporting cycles, with subsidiary month-end close taking weeks, and a budgeting process that stretched over 3 months.
“We reached a point where continuing with manual processes was just unsustainable,” recalls Dilend Chawda, CFO of Rinnai Australia. “We needed a central source of truth—not just to reduce risk and errors, but to enable better collaboration and decision-making.”
Rinnai needed a modern, scalable finance platform that supported growth, improved agility and enabled AI adoption. They began exploring solutions to modernize their finance function.
saved through automated reporting and consolidation
After evaluating several options, Rinnai chose IBM Business Partner Octane Software Solutions in mid-2024 as the trusted expert to modernize their finance platform. Using IBM Planning Analytics, Octane led a phased rollout that delivered quick wins while minimizing risk. The IBM Business Partner hybrid onshore-offshore model and deep expertise in finance ensured cost efficiency and scalability. Additionally, a low-code approach kept internal teams actively engaged, accelerating the adoption of the new platform across Rinnai’s workforce.
The deployment has streamlined month-end reporting, product profitability analysis, demand planning, and introduced a 2025 Budget Suite integrated with sales, workforce planning, and capital expenditure. The platform now serves as a single source of truth, enabling collaboration and modeling for diverse needs. Having completed the groundwork to make their data AI-ready, Rinnai is currently working with Octane through a series of workshops to explore how IBM watsonx Orchestrate® can be leveraged to improve forecasting, optimize stock levels, and reduce manual work.
Rinnai’s finance team has transformed with IBM Planning Analytics, achieving major efficiency gains and strategic advantages such as:
- 40 hours of time savings per week driven by automated reporting and consolidation, cutting subsidiary reporting to 4 days.
- 50% drop in reliance on spreadsheets, eliminating version control issues
- Smarter decisions through product-level profit allocation, with budgeting shifting to a more collaborative process built on shared, integrated data models.
The modernization of the company’s finance systems has boosted employee morale, moving focus from data entry to analysis. Rinnai is now leveraging predictive models for working capital, alongside IBM Planning Analytics and IBM watsonx® for natural language queries and outlier detection. The initiative has positioned their finance team as a strategic partner, driving faster decisions and targeting a 10% inventory reduction—offering CFOs lessons on acting early, quantifying benefits and fostering a collaborative culture. As Chawda notes, “AI needs to be embedded—and the longer you wait, the harder and more expensive it gets.”
By partnering with Octane, Rinnai has turned finance from a reactive reporting function into a proactive driver of strategic insights—becoming future-ready for the AI era.
Rinnai Australia is a leading manufacturer and distributor of heating, cooling and hot water systems. With operations across multiple subsidiaries and a history of acquisitions, Rinnai has been a trusted name in Australia for over 50 years. The company operates in 20 countries, bringing global expertise to tailor solutions to the Australian lifestyle. Rinnai’s suite of brands, including Rinnai, Brivis, APAC and Polo, delivers high-quality products.
Octane Software Solutions is a specialist IBM partner that brings deep expertise in IBM Planning Analytics and finance transformation. They offer a hybrid onshore-offshore delivery model that helps businesses scale resources as needed and manage costs effectively. Octane’s low-code approach encourages internal teams to stay hands-on throughout rollouts, accelerating adoption and capability-building.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.