Dem bones – many of us have heard the song in childhood, but did you know that it makes for a great illustration of how connected planning enables business functions to work together
What happens if your planning process is not connected?
A number of problems plague businesses that don’t use connected planning
- Do you find your business functions working in silos?
- Do you hear colleagues questioning the reliability of the data?
- Do your management team worry about errors that highlight the lack of integrity and accuracy?
- Does your planning team work extra hours every cycle because your spreadsheets are inefficient and/or ineffective?
- Are you using highly skilled people to do repetitive, mundane, processes?
- Do you struggle to make changes to, or scale, your spreadsheet models?
Is it possible to overcome all these challenges?
Yes. Unified connected planning and reporting platforms address all these problems, and provide extraordinary capabilities way beyond anything that a planning and analytics team using a spreadsheet-based planning process could even imagine!
Some examples:
A South African bank had one model that previously took 80 hours to build, and it now completes in seconds!
A South American bank had ‘What if’ planning scenarios that used to take 2 days, now take just a few seconds!
A Fortune 500 bank automated their workforce planning and saved over $100million while reducing risk. Before, scenario modelling took 3-5 days, now it is almost instantaneous!
A European investment group manages some funds which require a 70-year forecast. Previously their planning process took a week to prepare, and they were only able to compare 20 scenarios. Now they can compare over 25,000 scenarios at the same time, and they model scenarios live in board meetings.
A European insurer used to spend weeks preparing P&L statements. Now, after connecting finance, sales, and marketing planning processes, P&L statements are created in a matter of days.
A US insurer used to have an 18-week planning process. Now the planning cycle completes in seven weeks (a 60% reduction), and they save 6,000 hours a year. Underwriting models, controllable expenses, shared service allocation model, consolidation model, and capital model are linked and all created concurrently.
The unique power of Connected Planning
Unified connected planning and reporting platforms can automate, integrate and accelerate the entire enterprise planning process across all the business functions, including:
- Finance
- Sales and Marketing
- Supply Chain
- HR Workforce
The beauty of this is that whenever anyone changes any part of the plan, the entire plan changes, almost instantly!
Conclusion
Just imagine the difference it would make to your business if you could complete the planning process in half the time it currently takes.
Connected planning platforms don’t just save time and money; they also provide an agility that drives competitive advantage in a way that few other technologies can do.
