Think you don’t have control of data and its effect on financial performance? Think again. Data volume is growing, data sources are multiplying, and the business environment is more volatile than ever. Leading edge CFOs are leveraging this new information to improve their planning, forecasting, and modeling efforts. They are breaking free from traditional processes and silos in favor of integrated and continuous planning. Could 2015 be the year your organization starts using FP&A to more positively impact your company’s business performance? View the slides from our webinar with Steve Player, managing partner, the Player Group.
A: As expected they are focused on helping their organization achieve outstanding performance. But the environment they are operating in is characterized by extreme validity. As they plan they must deal with:
Widely fluctuating commodity prices
i.e. Oil price dropping by 2/3s. How long will it stay below $50 per barrel? What does it mean to your organization.
b. Shifting governmental environments that can dramatically shift opportunity into threats and vice versa.
c. Rapidly evolving technologies filled with changes that can disrupt entire value streams.
i. e. Uber disrupting the taxi industry
i. e. Amazon wiping out book stores (Barnes & Noble to the neighborhood store) and now moving on to most retail categories
i.e. most postal services are steadily declining
These rapid changes point out the difficulty in relying on traditional annual budgets. These have become exercises in negotiation. That is one of the biggest changes we see in finance is the elimination of annual budgets as CFOs move to using relative targets, rolling forecasts, and a continuous planning environment.
Question: What are those 5 ways?
Answer:
We find CFOs who are…
Starting with an integrated strategic plan that provides a clear articulation of the strategic goals and the strategic action plans to reach those goals.
They still do financial planning with periodic forecasts in place of budgets but are now able to create fully integrated enterprise plans that include:
Consolidations
Reporting and analysis
Cash flow planning
Balance sheets and monitoring of debt covenants.
Advanced rolling forecasts which keep management focused on closing the gap to strategic objectives
Detailed sales planning the tracks demand generations and includes
Territory planning
Commission planning and calculations
Linkage back to operational planning which includes:
Work force/ head count planning
Capacity planning
Q: Many of these elements have been appearing in the news. What is it that CFOs find and do differently to be successful in 2015?
A: The biggest difference in the fact that these needs are being address by fully integrated software that includes and automatically links all these elements.
In the past, finance would cobble together a series of Excel spreadsheets. The control environment was weak and collaboration meant email, phone calls, and hope that the other parties used the template version. Finance could own the resulting output but it carried huge potential risks.
By moving these processes into an integrated system, you can still own your data, own your process, and own your results. But now that is taking place in an integrated environment.
https://www.anaplan.com/press-releases/britvic-selects-anaplan-to-support-improved-planing-execution-and-evaluation/
CHALLENGES
Assess trade terms for GB customers to determine our business plans and investments
Complex spreadsheet managed these business plans
Changes wouldn’t be immediate and could affect the executing our commercial strategy
Inability to see alternative views on the data
SOLUTION
Replaced complicated spreadsheets with Anaplan
RESULTS
A layer of improvement to Britvic’s trade planning process, ensuring greater alignment between Britvic’s commercial strategy and the trade agreements established with its customers
In-memory HyperBlockTM calculation engine that delivers unparalleled immediacy, flexibility and scale
Q: Ownership and accountability are key themes to empowering the organization to achieve optimal performance. But how can a CFO and his or her Finance organization own performance when they face such an uncertain operating environment as you discussed earlier?
A: That is where technology can really help. With the planning systems available today, finance organizations can produce light touch driver-based forecasts that leverage the latest assumptions of what the future can hold.
But finance can also produce a series of scenario plans that examine what actions should be taken if those assumptions come in stronger or weaker than anticipated. Many organizations are even planning beyond the realm of likely occurrences to identify contingency plans should oil drop even further (down to even $10 per barrel – which it expectantly did back in 1986). Whether this is a positive scenario or a negative one depends on whether you are an oil producer or consumer. Having a plan for these creates what we call a “future ready” organization.
Your organization needs modeling that is continuously available to robustly handle diverse needs. Today’s systems should be capable of changing with your changing business needs.
CHALLENGES
Rapidly growing company and market
Data Feeds from Disparate Systems
Corporate Philosophy to leverage cloud based solutions
SOLUTION
Complete FP&A solution: long range planning, monthly reporting, financial reports, and workforce planning in an integrated workspace
Team trained in 2 days on platform features and tools
Anaplan Connect: ETL tool to load data from external systems
RESULTS
Increased collaboration across departments with Cloud based solution
100% business self-service where users, not IT or consultants, manage development
Easily able to expand toolset to coincide with growth of company and market
Q: One key topic we hear a lot about is cloud computing and how that is disrupting the economics of systems costs. How does cloud computing impact these decisions?
A: As you point out, cloud computing is disrupting the software industry. The cloud is seen:
- as faster in implement,
- lower cost,
- easier, quicker, and cheaper to upgrade
- more flexible to use in varying operating environments
- requiring less IT support
- and many other power selling points.
Its main concerns of security are being addressed rapidly and successfully in many cases. While the recent data thefts at Target and others have raised cyber-security questions, the move toward the clouds continues.
I would caution large and growing organizations that you need to get you IT resources involved in helping plan an evaluate cloud decisions. Information access and related security questions are complex and require knowledge of how your systems will interact. So partner with IT. Those are risks that you want to jointly own.
Q: Why do you think Finance organizations are so quick to embrace these advanced planning approaches?
A: Frankly, we in Finance are “tired of doing dumb stuff.” We can eliminate sand-bagging and stop pointless rounds of negotiating the lowest acceptable return.
By pushing down into sales planning and operational planning we can help develop the tactics needed to achieve the strategic objectives. Operational managers and sales leaders become key adopters when they see their business problems mapped into model that allows them to evaluate multiple approaches and helps them decide which are most likely to succeed (these systems even track the key measures of that monitor that success).
https://www.anaplan.com/customers/aviva-casestudy/
CHALLENGES
Lacked agility to build scenarios quickly and deal with multiple versions
Current planning tool based on financial reporting entities was unable to easily mirror their new segmentation approach into “cells”
SOLUTION
Single data source across businesses ensures financial control and speedy aggregation of group view
Quickly build scenarios, manage multiple versions and create customized reporting hierarchies with easy to use front-end
Rapid collaborative roll-out and training enables seamless transition
RESULTS
Time to consolidate the plan numbers reduced from one week to one day
Cloud-based process connects business units in real time enabling a faster, more efficient and collaborative planning process without compromising accuracy
Reduced planning and forecasting cycle by 4-6 weeks
It is possible, and here’s why.
At Anaplan, we designed a new way to empower enterprises to manage your unstoppable planning needs.
With Anaplan, you can plan for any aspect of your business, and bring it all together to see the complete, big picture.
From Trade and promotions planning to quota optimization in Sales, from annual budgeting to rolling forecasting in Finance, from demand planning in operations to headcount planning across it all. Anaplan empowers you to model potential impacts and course correct on the fly for the best outcome
Unlike legacy systems, Anaplan was built from the ground up to run at hyper-speed to meet today’s growing performance needs.
With Anaplan you can have confidence your growing data can all be handled without slowing up the whole process.
With Anaplan’s in-memory platform you can plan, execute and continually optimize the way you do business.
OLDER NOTES:
From evaluating acquisitions to changing pipelines to team changes,
. With just a few clicks and no IT intervention,
you can see changes instantly ripple through your connected plans to reveal the impact across your business.
Objective: Dive into Anaplan’s unique value proposition across the enterprise.
Talk Track: Anaplan has enabled companies across the globe to solve for key challenges across their organizations from sales to finance to operations and more. We are purpose-built to manage massive volumes of data, high degrees of model & process complexity while enabling large numbers of people to collaborate on a single source of truth.
Bottom Line:
Anaplan is unparalleled in its ability to solve the challenges of large scale organizations.
One of the most important things to understand about Anaplan is that it is a planning and modeling platform. There are applications from both Anaplan and our partners that solve specific problems, like Anaplan’s Financial Consolidation app or Deloitte’s Tax & Transfer Pricing app.
But the Anaplan platform can be used to plan and model just about anything, like the use cases we see here in Finance, Sales, Operations, and HR.
Let’s look at how some of our customers are using Anaplan.
Hewlett Packard uses Anaplan to optimize their territory and quota plans for their entire sales force. 20K reps, 30K on commission, 3500 sales managers. They had done it before in Excel; 300 cascading spreadsheets. They didn’t know their deployed quota until the 2nd quarter. Now they have a single, living plan and know their deployed quota on day 1.
Kimberly Clark started using Anaplan in Eastern Europe and is now moving toward using Anaplan for integrated business planning across the enterprise.
Diageo is one of Anaplan’s earliest major customers. They started using Anaplan to plan and optimize their trade promotions in the US, and now have deployed more than 30 apps and models on Anaplan, doing everything from Demand Planning for their SAP backend, to pricing optimization across their brands and SKUs.
So, what’s the common thread? These are all critical business problems that involve a lot of business users collaborating around the numbers that drive your business forward, whether those are sales, financial, or operational plans.
Instead of doing hundreds or thousands of one-off, error-prone spreadsheet exercises, your teams can bring in whatever data they need and plan, model, and collaborate around numbers they can have absolute confidence in.
Strategy does not create value. Data itself does not create value; only decisions and action create value. That is what planning is. A cascade of decisions and actions that create value.
Anaplan has reinvented planning for the modern enterprise, allowing you to plan, collaborate, and act in real time.