CASE STUDY · FLAGSHIP · LAGARDÈRE TRAVEL RETAIL
Six people. Five weeks. In production.
How Lagardère Travel Retail Romania replaced a planning process at its operational limits with a custom enterprise platform — built with Spec-Driven Development and Claude Code, on fixed price, on time.
The problem
Lagardère Travel Retail Romania plans Sales, Gross Margin, Extra Margin, and Non-Retail Income across roughly 400 non-airport stores, a 16-store airport network, four distinct budgeting methodologies, and multiple forecast cycles per year. The previous Excel and Power Query process had reached its operational limits — under data volume, under parallel version management, and under the pressure of reproducing numbers in management meetings. Institutional knowledge lived in a few key people. There was no defensible audit trail from reported numbers back to inputs.
The solution — five architectural principles
1
One source of truth.
The database is the canonical record. Every input has an owner, a timestamp, and a reason.
2
Full traceability from total to grain.
Every reported number drills back through each calculation step to the input that produced it.
3
Cycle-safe immutable snapshots.
What was reported in a prior cycle stays reproducible forever.
4
Controlled — not eliminated — Excel.
Excel remains a familiar bulk-input channel, flowing through governed templates with diff-and-confirm validation. No longer the engine; a governed entry point.
5
Active anomaly surfacing.
Bad data is blocked before it commits, not discovered after the fact.
The build
Delivered in approximately five weeks by a 6-person team using Spec-Driven Development with Claude Code as the primary development engine — specs as the single source of truth, synced automatically into documentation and delivery tooling. Deployed entirely within the client's Azure environment, secured through single sign-on, exposed as a managed service. Validated against the client's own historical cycles before cutover.
The outcome
BUILD LEDGER
IN PRODUCTION
- status
- In production, successfully through the first full budget cycle
- saved
- An estimated 1,100–1,330 finance-team hours recovered per year
- trust
- Every reported number defensible; every cycle reproducible
- cost
- Delivered at a fraction of the cost of off-the-shelf enterprise planning platforms
- ownership
- The platform — source code, schema, and documentation — remains the client's property
From spreadsheets that lock up to a planning engine that scales.