Plan for anything, be ready for everything: Integrated planning for resiliency
Plan for anything, be ready for everything: Integrated planning for resiliency
Table of contents
Table of contents
Key points
Overview
Integration is key to streamlined planning, budgeting, and forecasting. In order to adapt to quickly changing market conditions, you need business planning software that leverages automation and AI to create a single source of truth and bring speed and agility to your planning process.
Nearly 30% of surveyed companies still use Excel spreadsheets with no underlying database or specific planning functionality as their principal planning product. This is devastating in today’s age of digitalization and increasing need for data-centric management decisions. 1
Inadequate planning tools such as spreadsheets cause a delay of critical information that can cause a ripple effect, driving poor decision making and poor results. Today’s business simply cannot afford this type of cost in our customer-centric environment, where data is one of our most valuable assets. To emerge from the pandemic with resiliency, businesses demand a planning app that can deliver acceleration, agility, and collaboration.
Ready to talk about integrated planning today? Schedule a consult.
What is integrated planning?
A must in the culture of “now.”
In virtually all industries and especially in light of our drastically changing market, work has become more interactive and collaborative, requiring more sharing of information (and more data complexity than ever). This means seamlessly integrating information from both strategic planning and operational perspectives as well as across different functional and even external sources.
Integrated planning mirrors the modern way we do business – it elevates the critical value of collaboration and cuts through data silos, driving more access to information and faster insights. Best-in-class organizations use highly collaborative approaches to plan, budget, and forecast. Business planning requires accurate and complete data and buy-in across the entire organization. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But organizational silos are some of the biggest obstacles to accomplishing good work because they hinder critical decisions that strategically steer the business.
Integrated planning involves leveraging a dynamic planning solution that everyone in the organization can use to create one source of truth. It allows all users to access the information they need when they need it, and it unifies data from diverse data sources such as ERPs, CRMs, and HRMs. Integrated planning helps ensure that plans, budgets, and forecasts are created with a holistic approach, making trends easy to spot and quickly act on, and helping to produce the most accurate and reliable plans possible.
Bringing together people, data, and technology leaves organizations well-poised for optimal performance. Most importantly, integrated planning enables employees to be agile in responding to changing circumstances and able make the best decisions possible – all at the speed of modern business.
“Many companies and users know that there can be no planning without supporting functionality for reporting, analysis and monitoring. The integration of planning and analytics with specialist software solutions in one common platform is therefore essential.”2
According to a study from the Business Application Research Center (BARC), leaders who adopt specialized planning software see increased transparency, better quality results, improved integration with reporting/analysis, more precise planning, and improved integration of sub-budgets.
Figure 1: (Source: BARC The Planning Survey 20)3
Poll
Do you have an integrated view of your data?
I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department
I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)
I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning
Poll
Do you have an integrated view of your data?
I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department
I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)
I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning
Poll
Do you have an integrated view of your data?
I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department
I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)
I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning
eCapital helps Basin Electric provide faster insights
Basin Electric worked with IBM Business Partner eCapital to upgrade their TM1 solution to IBM Planning Analytics. While TM1 allowed Basin to connect all its systems to create one source of truth, IBM Planning Analytics provides a new level of refined user interface and ease of use so the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals can focus on results and not on collecting and organizing data.
Emerge with resiliency
Businesses with the agility to course-correct will take the lead
The truth about plans is they always change—an undeniable reality that businesses across the globe are facing today. A dynamic, integrated planning solution helps you create the most flexible plan possible. And it does more than just plan – it analyzes data, reveals trends, and allows for real-time iteration.
Resilient organizations have the visibility and coordination required to enact a faster, more strategic response to the unexpected
It is more important than ever to invest in a solution that brings together all your data into one place, giving you the ability to pinpoint disruptions, and pivot in real time.
Unfortunately, agility dies in siloes. Too many finance teams rely on the manual collection of data into spreadsheets, which are often disconnected. When a finance professional is collecting and analyzing budget spreadsheets from across the organization, there is high risk for error in the process of combining and editing, causing confusion at the highest levels. Contradictory data can inhibit a clear picture of what is actually going on and identifying business drivers or detractors. Planning in spreadsheets has proven over and over to be a highly imperfect yet highly common business practice.
The CFO and the finance organization will play a leading role in reinventing the workforce: creating a knowledgeable, agile, collaborative and empowered team to lead the organization into the future.4
5 spreadsheet
hazards
Aside from outright errors, spreadsheets can present other limitations and drawbacks when organizations try to use them for large-scale performance management.
Wasted time
Conflicting versions of the truth
Missing insights from the front lines of the business
Inability to react quickly to changes
Spreadsheets painful to maintain
IBM’s Institute for Business Value found that a majority of finance leaders understand the need for process reinvention, with 66% saying they are effective at streamlining and digitizing finance operations.5
Planning across the organization
Bye bye, silos. Hello, cross-functional planning.
At every level of business, for finance and beyond, it’s critical to be able to access a full range of data to understand how change impacts the business. Though it often starts with finance, it is shortsighted to think that many other areas of the business don’t need to use a planning solution, as well. Leaders across the following areas are increasingly adopting planning solutions to generate better business results.
Operational planning
Though “operational planning” covers an enormous range of business activities, the most universal is Sales and operations planning (S&OP). S&OP is the integrated process that the supply chain organization leverages to achieve visibility and transformation across the entire organization and throughout the value chain. Demand planning and supply chain planning are two teams under constant pressure to reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve margins. Unfortunately, too many of them lack visibility into data and are misaligned with other teams. One centralized tool can help connect operational planning tactics with financial planning and analysis (FP&A) to allocate resources more effectively in response to market opportunities or competitive threats.
“This process just allocated roughly 1,000 production slots to the appropriate forecast groups from June 2017 through September 2018 in 12 minutes, which included time to review data to make sure there were no issues. ”
- Bruce DeMaster, Value Stream Manager, JLG Industries
Learn more about operations planning
Workforce planning
A company is only as good its people, right? That’s why it’s so important to hire and retain the right talent. Alignment between workforce planning, FP&A and operational planning is crucial to ensure that the right people are in the right roles at the right time in order to meet organizational demands. This is rarely a simple task and too often it involves manual spreadsheet-based processes. Ensuring that HR analytics and staffing targets are in sync with broader organizational objectives requires high levels of planning integration.
“In the past, individual sites had limited visibility of the expertise available elsewhere. Now, our sites will be able to track the expertise available across the whole business, and as soon as we receive a new order we can either move labor to where it is needed, or even move the project to the best site to satisfy the request. ”
- David Legge, Global IT Projects Director, GKN Aerospace
Learn more about workforce planning
Sales planning
A misalignment between finance, marketing and sales could lead to investment in the wrong initiatives, missed opportunities, and inaccurate revenue forecasts. This misalignment can severely hinder sales growth. And in a fast-moving market, manual processes and siloed systems are detrimental to agility. Decisions that are based on outdated information can lead to misguided sales strategies and thus lost sales and lost revenue. It’s critical to unite data under one roof for one single view to boost sales and effectively manage sales people.
“Now the sales operations team has direct access to complete data, allowing them to answer analytical questions instantly. To say the least, this solution has been transformative.”
- MeekDirector, Business Intelligence, Cantel Medical
Learn more about sales planning
Marketing planning
Constantly changing customer preferences and rising customer expectations require marketers to interpret high volumes of data and respond appropriately. But siloed data systems give only a partial picture and hinder smart decision-making. In addition, marketing teams can be fragmented and often disconnected from sales. This can lead to siloed planning and misalignment with overall marketing goals, driving misallocated spend on the wrong elements of the marketing mix. With manual, siloed processes, it’s challenging to get a clear view of how marketing activities affect one another, how the combination of marketing and sales touches moves a lead through the funnel and how marketing helps achieve overall financial and business goals.
“We first needed a better handle on our sales data. With so many lines of business, channels, and franchisees, collecting and consolidating this information was something that we knew we could do better.”
- Donald Neumann, Demand Manager, Grupo Boticário
Learn more about marketing planning
IT planning
In IT, you need a business case for every dollar spent. But balancing the IT needs of an entire organization with digital transformation objectives and constant technology innovation is no simple task, and often requires additional resources. That’s why it’s so important leverage a planning solution that keeps IT focused on the projects that matter, automates planning tasks, gives a clear view into resources available, and helps measure ROI. It’s also critical to coordinate with both finance and human resources to ensure the right resources are provided for IT initiatives and projects.
“IBM Planning Analytics will help us update our operational and strategic plans on a monthly basis, instead of quarterly—so we will be able to react much more quickly when market conditions change.”
— Alaa Soueif, IT Director, ARDIC
Learn more about IT planning
The ultimate integrated planning solution
Operations, sales, marketing, human resources and other departments and disciplines all have a need for fast, flexible planning and analysis. And all of them can use the same tools to provide insight and manage performance. When people in one part of the organization see how their decisions affect other parts of the organization, all of the activities will be better coordinated–and drive higher results. And one integrated solution that streamlines planning, budgeting, and forecasting across the organization can drive major cost savings
According to an IBM-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1® has saved clients $1.2M over 3 years in streamlined budgeting alone.
Source: Forrester TEI Study: IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1 6
Become a leader
With IBM Planning Analytics, you can break down siloes and generate an integrated view of your departmental or organizational performance. Infused with AI, this solution enables you to create more accurate forecasts, identify potential performance gaps before they occur, and make resource allocation decisions quickly and intelligently. Using multidimensional modeling and scenario analysis, IBM Planning Analytics lets you drill down into your data to examine the ripple effects of alternative courses of action and understand how your decision will affect the organization and ultimately impact your bottom line.
With Planning Analytics On Demand, businesses of any size can take advantage of modern planning solutions starting at just $45/month with no minimum user count.
Using what-if scenario analysis to make smarter decisions
With IBM Planning Analytics, you can build multidimensional models and perform “what-if” analysis to explore scenarios or test business assumptions. Creating and maintaining sophisticated models with advanced sandboxing capabilities is simple. Easily test business assumptions and model scenarios to immediately see the impact of alternative courses of action on before deciding to implement changes.
Next steps
Get started for just $45/month
Discover integrated planning within reach
Download the Software Selection Guide
Determine the best planning solution for you
Start your free 30-day trial
Get a real taste of functionality of Planning Analytics
Sources
Table of contents
Overview
Overview
Integration is key to streamlined planning, budgeting, and forecasting. In order to adapt to quickly changing market conditions, you need business planning software that leverages automation and AI to create a single source of truth and bring speed and agility to your planning process.
Nearly 30% of surveyed companies still use Excel spreadsheets with no underlying database or specific planning functionality as their principal planning product. This is devastating in today’s age of digitalization and increasing need for data-centric management decisions.1
Inadequate planning tools such as spreadsheets cause a delay of critical information that can cause a ripple effect, driving poor decision making and poor results. Today’s business simply cannot afford this type of cost in our customer-centric environment, where data is one of our most valuable assets. To emerge from the pandemic with resiliency, businesses demand a planning app that can deliver acceleration, agility, and collaboration.
Ready to talk about integrated planning today? Schedule a consult.
What is integrated planning?
What is integrated planning?
A must in the culture of “now.”
In virtually all industries and especially in light of our drastically changing market, work has become more interactive and collaborative, requiring more sharing of information (and more data complexity than ever). This means seamlessly integrating information from both strategic planning and operational perspectives as well as across different functional and even external sources.
Integrated planning mirrors the modern way we do business – it elevates the critical value of collaboration and cuts through data silos, driving more access to information and faster insights. Best-in-class organizations use highly collaborative approaches to plan, budget, and forecast. Business planning requires accurate and complete data and buy-in across the entire organization. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But organizational silos are some of the biggest obstacles to accomplishing good work because they hinder critical decisions that strategically steer the business.
Integrated planning involves leveraging a dynamic planning solution that everyone in the organization can use to create one source of truth. It allows all users to access the information they need when they need it, and it unifies data from diverse data sources such as ERPs, CRMs, and HRMs. Integrated planning helps ensure that plans, budgets, and forecasts are created with a holistic approach, making trends easy to spot and quickly act on, and helping to produce the most accurate and reliable plans possible.
Bringing together people, data, and technology leaves organizations well-poised for optimal performance. Most importantly, integrated planning enables employees to be agile in responding to changing circumstances and able make the best decisions possible – all at the speed of modern business.
According to a study from the Business Application Research Center (BARC), leaders who adopt specialized planning software see increased transparency, better quality results, improved integration with reporting/analysis, more precise planning, and improved integration of sub-budgets.
Figure 1: (Source: BARC The Planning Survey 20)3
Many companies and users know that there can be no planning without supporting functionality for reporting, analysis and monitoring. The integration of planning and analytics with specialist software solutions in one common platform is therefore essential.2
Poll
Do you have an integrated view of your data?
I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department
I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)
I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning
Poll
Do you have an integrated view of your data?
I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department
I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)
I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning
Poll
Do you have an integrated view of your data?
I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department
I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)
I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning
eCapital helps Basin Electric provide faster insights
Basin Electric worked with IBM Business Partner eCapital to upgrade their TM1 solution to IBM Planning Analytics. While TM1 allowed Basin to connect all its systems to create one source of truth, IBM Planning Analytics provides a new level of refined user interface and ease of use so the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals can focus on results and not on collecting and organizing data.
Emerge with resiliency
Emerge with resiliency
Businesses with the agility to course-correct will take the lead
The truth about plans is they always change—an undeniable reality that businesses across the globe are facing today. A dynamic, integrated planning solution helps you create the most flexible plan possible. And it does more than just plan – it analyzes data, reveals trends, and allows for real-time iteration.
Resilient organizations have the visibility and coordination required to enact a faster, more strategic response to the unexpected
It is more important than ever to invest in a solution that brings together all your data into one place, giving you the ability to pinpoint disruptions, and pivot in real time.
Unfortunately, agility dies in siloes. Too many finance teams rely on the manual collection of data into spreadsheets, which are often disconnected. When a finance professional is collecting and analyzing budget spreadsheets from across the organization, there is high risk for error in the process of combining and editing, causing confusion at the highest levels. Contradictory data can inhibit a clear picture of what is actually going on and identifying business drivers or detractors. Planning in spreadsheets has proven over and over to be a highly imperfect yet highly common business practice.
The CFO and the finance organization will play a leading role in reinventing the workforce: creating a knowledgeable, agile, collaborative and empowered team to lead the organization into the future.4
5
spreadsheet hazards
Aside from outright errors, spreadsheets can present other limitations and drawbacks when organizations try to use them for large-scale performance management.
Wasted time
Conflicting versions of the truth
Missing insights from the front lines of the business
Inability to react quickly to changes
Spreadsheets painful to maintain
IBM’s Institute for Business Value found that a majority of finance leaders understand the need for process reinvention, with 66% saying they are effective at streamlining and digitizing finance operations.5
Planning across the organization
Planning across the organization
Bye bye, silos. Hello, cross-functional planning.
At every level of business, for finance and beyond, it’s critical to be able to access a full range of data to understand how change impacts the business. Though it often starts with finance, it is shortsighted to think that many other areas of the business don’t need to use a planning solution, as well. Leaders across the following areas are increasingly adopting planning solutions to generate better business results.
Operational planning
Though “operational planning” covers an enormous range of business activities, the most universal is Sales and operations planning (S&OP). S&OP is the integrated process that the supply chain organization leverages to achieve visibility and transformation across the entire organization and throughout the value chain. Demand planning and supply chain planning are two teams under constant pressure to reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve margins. Unfortunately, too many of them lack visibility into data and are misaligned with other teams. One centralized tool can help connect operational planning tactics with financial planning and analysis (FP&A) to allocate resources more effectively in response to market opportunities or competitive threats.
“This process just allocated roughly 1,000 production slots to the appropriate forecast groups from June 2017 through September 2018 in 12 minutes, which included time to review data to make sure there were no issues.”
- Bruce DeMaster, Value Stream Manager, JLG Industries
Learn more about operations planning
Workforce planning
A company is only as good its people, right? That’s why it’s so important to hire and retain the right talent. Alignment between workforce planning, FP&A and operational planning is crucial to ensure that the right people are in the right roles at the right time in order to meet organizational demands. This is rarely a simple task and too often it involves manual spreadsheet-based processes. Ensuring that HR analytics and staffing targets are in sync with broader organizational objectives requires high levels of planning integration.
“In the past, individual sites had limited visibility of the expertise available elsewhere. Now, our sites will be able to track the expertise available across the whole business, and as soon as we receive a new order we can either move labor to where it is needed, or even move the project to the best site to satisfy the request. ”
- David Legge, Global IT Projects Director, GKN Aerospace
Learn more about workforce planning
Sales planning
A misalignment between finance, marketing and sales could lead to investment in the wrong initiatives, missed opportunities, and inaccurate revenue forecasts. This misalignment can severely hinder sales growth. And in a fast-moving market, manual processes and siloed systems are detrimental to agility. Decisions that are based on outdated information can lead to misguided sales strategies and thus lost sales and lost revenue. It’s critical to unite data under one roof for one single view to boost sales and effectively manage sales people.
“Now the sales operations team has direct access to complete data, allowing them to answer analytical questions instantly. To say the least, this solution has been transformative.”
- MeekDirector, Business Intelligence, Cantel Medical
Learn more about sales planning
Marketing planning
Constantly changing customer preferences and rising customer expectations require marketers to interpret high volumes of data and respond appropriately. But siloed data systems give only a partial picture and hinder smart decision-making. In addition, marketing teams can be fragmented and often disconnected from sales. This can lead to siloed planning and misalignment with overall marketing goals, driving misallocated spend on the wrong elements of the marketing mix. With manual, siloed processes, it’s challenging to get a clear view of how marketing activities affect one another, how the combination of marketing and sales touches moves a lead through the funnel and how marketing helps achieve overall financial and business goals.
“We first needed a better handle on our sales data. With so many lines of business, channels, and franchisees, collecting and consolidating this information was something that we knew we could do better.”
- Donald Neumann, Demand Manager, Grupo Boticário
Learn more about marketing planning
IT planning
In IT, you need a business case for every dollar spent. But balancing the IT needs of an entire organization with digital transformation objectives and constant technology innovation is no simple task, and often requires additional resources. That’s why it’s so important leverage a planning solution that keeps IT focused on the projects that matter, automates planning tasks, gives a clear view into resources available, and helps measure ROI. It’s also critical to coordinate with both finance and human resources to ensure the right resources are provided for IT initiatives and projects.
“IBM Planning Analytics will help us update our operational and strategic plans on a monthly basis, instead of quarterly—so we will be able to react much more quickly when market conditions change.”
— Alaa Soueif, IT Director, ARDIC
Learn more about IT planning
The ultimate integrated planning solution
The ultimate integrated planning solution
Operations, sales, marketing, human resources and other departments and disciplines all have a need for fast, flexible planning and analysis. And all of them can use the same tools to provide insight and manage performance. When people in one part of the organization see how their decisions affect other parts of the organization, all of the activities will be better coordinated–and drive higher results. And one integrated solution that streamlines planning, budgeting, and forecasting across the organization can drive major cost savings
According to an IBM-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1® has saved clients $1.2M over 3 years in streamlined budgeting alone.
Source: Forrester TEI Study: IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1 6
Become a leader
With IBM Planning Analytics, you can break down siloes and generate an integrated view of your departmental or organizational performance. Infused with AI, this solution enables you to create more accurate forecasts, identify potential performance gaps before they occur, and make resource allocation decisions quickly and intelligently. Using multidimensional modeling and scenario analysis, IBM Planning Analytics lets you drill down into your data to examine the ripple effects of alternative courses of action and understand how your decision will affect the organization and ultimately impact your bottom line.
With Planning Analytics On Demand, businesses of any size can take advantage of modern planning solutions starting at just $45/month with no minimum user count.
Using what-if scenario analysis to make smarter decisions
With IBM Planning Analytics, you can build multidimensional models and perform “what-if” analysis to explore scenarios or test business assumptions. Creating and maintaining sophisticated models with advanced sandboxing capabilities is simple. Easily test business assumptions and model scenarios to immediately see the impact of alternative courses of action on before deciding to implement changes.
Integrated Business Planning
Click on any quadrant for more information.
Next steps
Next steps
Get started for just $45/month
Discover integrated planning within reach
Download the Software Selection Guide
Determine the best planning solution for you
Start your free 30-day trial
Get a real taste of functionality of Planning Analytics