Integrated Planning in the Cloud
If your corporate planning processes are not integrated, collaborative and cloud-based, you may be flying blind.
Integrated planning enables companies to draw insights and knowledge on future events from deep within the organization to inform decision making and outlook at the top.
Companies like Anaplan have become tech unicorns by bringing this approach to their large (multi-billion dollar) clients.
Today it is accessible at a fraction of the cost.
Who benefits from Integrated Planning?
With scale comes complexity. Did you ever wonder how massive organizations can become blind to both external and internal events? Siloed information, disconnected business processes, and often times armies of excel spreadsheets are to blame. If you are fighting a cumbersome, brittle, excel-based or generally offline planning, forecasting or budgeting process then Integrated Planning is likely a good fit for you.
The Watch Outs
9 times out of 10 the tool is not the problem. The reality is that tools are just a symptom of a root cause: organizations that do not efficiently extract and synthesize all the signals available to them from within their teams and datasets.
Local sub-optimization is one of the most common failure modes for Integrated Planning. It's a fancy way to say individual teams, business units or groups optimize a planning process for their own immediate needs, and sacrifice the ability to incorporate their insights to the broader organization.
They key to success
Successful integrated planning requires deep knowledge of your business' operations, but you already have that. Most often, the missing component is a proper analytics infrastructure which allows for interoperability of datasets. A key sticking point is often the tools used to gather inputs from your people in the format of budgets, forecasts and plans. Getting these into cloud-based systems like Power BI allow for one planning tool to connect with the next.
Integrated OpEx Planning for a mid-sized energy company
Leave the spreadsheets behind and put both planning and forecasting into cloud based planning tools.
Outpredict, Outplan, Outperform.
We obsess over building smarter performance management processes and tools with our clients. We'd love to explore if this could be beneficial for you.
