In this Analyst Perspective from Robert Kugel, learn how FP&A can redefine its mission to achieve the long-stated goal of making it more of a strategic partner with the rest of the organization. This means fully adopting integrated business planning, a high participation, collaborative, action-oriented approach to planning and budgeting built on frequent, short planning sprints. Short planning cycles enable companies to achieve greater agility in responding to market or competitive changes, and in the face of a very uncertain future, companies have been discovering the value of rapid planning and budgeting cycles. Watch the video to learn more.
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Topics:
FP&A,
Office of Finance,
Budgeting,
Business Planning,
CFO,
financial planning,
forecasting
The workforce is an essential part of an organization’s overall business potential because it ensures continuous operations, even in black-swan events. The workforce is the core of the organization and should get the attention it deserves. In challenging times, a “customer-first” mentality tends to take hold — this is not unreasonable but in focusing on satisfying customers and opportunities, business leaders too often forget that the workforce experience is essential to achieving desired results. Fulfilling this objective requires technology designed to meet these human capital management (HCM) objectives. An organization’s agility and ability to invest adequate time and resources into the workforce experience is essential to an organization’s sustainability and operational effectiveness.
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Topics:
Sales,
Customer Experience,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Voice of the Customer,
Continuous Planning,
Business Continuity,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
Workforce Analytics,
Workforce Management,
Digital Technology,
Operations & Supply Chain,
Robotic Process Automation,
employee experience,
Conversational Computing,
AI and Machine Learning,
collaborative computing,
mobile computing,
agent management,
People Analytics
Centage recently released Budget Maestro Version 9, a complete revamping of its longstanding budgeting application designed for midsize companies. The software, now offered as a multitenant cloud-based offering, delivers several structural improvements that can enhance the effectiveness of a company’s planning processes and at the same time is easier to use. Budget Maestro Version 9 is designed to support what Centage is calling a “Smart Budgets” approach to replace traditional budgeting. This approach is consistent with what we have been calling integrated business planning.
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Topics:
Planning,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Consolidation,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
headcount planning
Tidemark Systems offers a suite of business planning applications that enable corporations to plan more effectively. The software facilitates rapid creation and frequent updating of integrated company plans by making it easy for individual business functions to create their own plans while allowing headquarters to connect them to create a unified view. I coined the term “integrated business planning” a decade ago to highlight the potential for technology to substantially improve the effectiveness of planning and budgeting in corporations, and it remains true that integrating business planning can produce superior results. Companies that maintain direct links between functional or departmental plans more often have a planning process that works well than others. Our next-generation business planning benchmark research shows that two-thirds (66%) of those that maintain such links have a planning process that works well or very well, compared to 40 percent that copy information from individual plans into an overall plan and just 25 percent in which plans have little or no connection.
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Topics:
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Customer Experience,
Human Capital,
Marketing Planning,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Business Planning,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Demand Planning,
Integrated Business Planning,
Project Planning
Our benchmark research on next-generation business planning finds that a large majority of companies rely on spreadsheets to manage planning processes. For example, four out of five use them for supply chain planning, and about two-thirds for budgeting and sales forecasting. Spreadsheets are the default choice for modeling and planning because they are flexible. They adapt to the needs of different parts of any type of business. Unfortunately, they have inherent defects that make them problematic when used in collaborative, repetitive enterprise processes such as planning and budgeting. While it’s easy to create a model, it can quickly become a barrier to more integrated planning across the business units in an enterprise. As I’ve noted before, software vendors and IT departments have been trying – mainly in vain – to get users to switch from spreadsheets to a variety of dedicated applications. They’ve failed to make much of a dent because although these applications have substantial advantages over spreadsheets when used in repetitive, collaborative enterprise tasks, these advantages are mainly realized after the model, process or report is put to use in the “production” phase (to borrow an IT term).
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Topics:
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Marketing Planning,
Reporting,
Sales Forecasting,
Budgeting,
Customer Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Business Planning,
Demand Planning,
Integrated Business Planning
