IBM Planning Analytics for financial planning & analysis

Volatility, uncertainty, and risk are now a part of the normal course of business.

As a result, business leaders must:

Help steer the enterprise back to growth and profit
Cope with the challenges of new regulatory mandates
Protect their organisation against unexpected losses and compliance demand

Organisations that are using manual and disconnected processes are faced with many challenges during their planning process. To adapt to today’s quickly changing business conditions, it is imperative to create a single source of truth and deliver speed and agility to your planning process.

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Integration across your organisation is key to delivering streamlined planning, budgeting, and forecasting for your business.

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What is Planning Analytics?

IBM Planning Analytics is an AI-infused integrated planning solution that combines budgeting and AI-enhanced forecasting with intuitive analysis. reporting and workflows.

This is more than planning.

This is optimal planning for the best execution.

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The technology is an enabler that can provide your organisation with:

1.

Agility

Easily adjust plans and forecasts in real time to anticipate or adapt to changing business strategies and conditions.

2.

Collaboration

Synchronise processes and data across the organisation, from finance to operations, to create more accurate, integrated plans.

3.

Acceleration

Reduce planning, forecasting, analysis cycles and get real-time insights to make more informed decisions.

Why Planning Analytics?

A modern AI-infused planning solution that unifies and streamlines planning across every part of your organisation. And here is how:

Example of the Integrated Business Planning that can be applied across an organisation

Business Value Reported by the Forrester’s Total Economic Impact Study on organisations that integrate their planning:

63% Time saved in completing annual budgeting cycles *
80% Faster planning system processing *
20% Time saved in completing tasks *

Source: “The Total Economic Impact of IBM Planning Analytics,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting., October 2019

Integrated Planning Across The Business infographic

Technology enhancements to consider Planning Analytics

Catherine Grainger: Head of Sempre Planning Practice:

Key Spotlight on the importance of integrated Planning:

As a finance professional that has worked on both sides of the finance fence, a CIMA qualified management accountant in industry, as well as more than 20 years in data and technology consultancy and an IBM Champion, I understand the pressure finance teams are under, as well as their frustrations and aspirations. From experience, I can also tell you not just how technology can help, but that, by implementing solutions that allow finance teams to use their skills to analyse data, they are driving better business outcomes for future-proofed financial resilience.

Technology and digital disruption are changing how companies operate and finance leaders are learning how to make the most of technology for data management, business planning, business intelligence and intelligent automation. Being a finance leader is no longer just about having finance skills. It’s about looking outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards, in order to become even more strategically important to an organisation – the first port of call for insight into current financial resilience and future plans is to maintain it.

Through our work with numerous finance and finance technology teams in leading UK organisations, Sempre has built a wealth of experience in understanding finance transformation, how to achieve it, the key components to focus on, and where organisations tend to fail.

To find out more, get in touch

What’s holding back your finance team?

Volatility, market uncertainty and risk: these are facts of life. No finance department can make these problems disappear. But, ideally, their main focus should be on addressing the issues – and not on manual spreadsheet-based processing. All that time spent collecting, consolidating and verifying data means less time solving real problems.

Circumstances and market conditions can shift quickly. Too often, finance is unable to deliver the plans, revised budgets, latest reports and insights needed to address those changes in a timely manner.

Other problems faced by businesses include the following:

Lack of in-house support
As a consequence, teams are unable to take advantage of the full functionality of existing planning analytics tools.
Lack of external support
Your existing partner doesn’t seem to understand how your business operates, let alone how you are trying to put financial analysis tools to work.

Reasons to Look at Planning Analytics

Create your very own, fully-customisable planning and analytics workspace.
Enables real people – i.e. finance and business users – to rapidly create reliable plans, budgets and forecasts.
Natural language search query capabilities ensures fast, powerful financial analysis.
Automatically creates compelling visualisations: While Finance stays in control of the planning process, this strong visual element makes it easier to collaborate with other departments.
Built to handle complex analysis: drill down for a granular view of product profitability and discover insights automatically, direct from the data.
Guided modelling: ask ‘what if’ questions – and get answers you can count on.

Find out more

Why Sempre?

Thorough pre-installation consultation and planning
Our approach starts with thorough evaluation of your organisational needs – not least, to ensure that this is this solution right for you. Factoring in these needs, and taking into account security and integrity, we establish what needs to be done to deliver ‘One Version of the Truth’ incorporating data from across your organisation.
Installation planning for minimum disruption
Whether you are upgrading from previous versions or adopting from scratch, we’re on hand to reduce non-availability of data and ensure ‘business as usual’ every step of the way.
Training
Our aim is to get your team up to speed as swiftly as possible – with the end goal of enabling you to become self-sufficient.
Ongoing support
A dedicated Customer Success Manager, ongoing access to our Support Desk, annual or biannual technology reviews ensure that you are always on top of your analytics environment. We’re here to ensure you get the very best out of your investment.

data integration as a service consultants

Sempre’s Managed Service gives you the support you need to be confident in your outputs along with the agility you require for the speed of business today.

Find out more about Sempre's Managed Service Solution

Planning Analytics Review

Cut load time in half.

As your Planning Analytics model grows, load times often grind to a halt, server space shrinks, and crashes become common. Tuning Planning Analytics can feel like a big mountain to climb, but there are solutions.

Talk to us about your current Planning Process

IBM Planning Analytics Training

Sharpen your skills, drive user adoption and grow your resume with our IBM Planning Analytics training courses.

Browse our courses

BLOG: Integrated Financial Planning

Integrated Financial Planning

Business Finance Partnering, the key to integrated planning, budgeting, and forecasting!

BLOG: The Evolving Role of the Finance Leader

The Evolving Role of the Finance Leader

Today’s finance leaders are developing the skills needed to play a critical role in ensuring their organisation stays adaptable and is able to build resilience, improve efficiency and make smarter decisions.

BLOG: What's New In Planning - Workspace 57 & 58

What’s New In Planning Analytics – Workspace 57 & 58

Improving the Planning cycle just got more interesting with new guided applications that are now available with the recent upgraded release for Planning Analytics - Workspace 57 & 58.

BLOG: Why 13-week Cashflow Forecasting is so popular

Why 13-week Cashflow Forecasting is so popular

With a constantly changing economic landscape, we need to be prepared with a better view of our cashflow, is 13 Weeks the magic number?

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