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Guide
How to future-proof your planning process in 2024
If they haven’t already, forward-thinking organizations are addressing their planning processes to line themselves up for success over the coming decade. Learn how.
Table of Contents
01. What’s at stake
Your competitors are also challenged with improving planning processes and many are making effective investments to elevate their planning process. This could effectively differentiate them in the market and transform them to more effectively compete, providing an advantage over your organization.
To be competitive, a seamless and coordinated enterprise planning process is a must to address the following:
- Managing revenue growth and improving margins
- Operational Improvement
- Leveraging technology effectively for competitive gain
- Product and service innovation
- Customer acquisition
These are top of mind initiatives to executive leadership over the next 2-3 years, and all require an effective approach to enterprise planning.
An effective planning implementation will also make accommodations for external risks to achieving the above priorities.
Planning must be agile to rapidly change plans based on shifts in assumptions, including the following destabilizing challenges:
- Economic inflation and recession
- Increased competition
- High-interest impact on operations and investment
- Global instability
- Supply chain/purchasing disruption
A complicated planning process in your organization will hinder the ability to achieve your goals and make accommodations for business risk.
02. Tech debt complicates matters
An organization’s technical debt from prior solution investment frequently hinders planning. Many have not moved to a single planning solution for enterprise planning and have established a loosely integrated planning platform that attempts to coordinate operational and financial planning through multiple solutions and offline spreadsheet processes.
As a result, firms experience the following with their planning:
- Takes far too long to update plans
- Does not enable a holistic approach to planning, rather is based on a piecemeal approach
- Does not effectively support/rationalize bottom-up and top-down planning
- Does not effectively support/rationalize bottom-up and top-down planning
- Does not communicate changes and updates effective from operation to financial planning and visa-versa
- Built by employees who have long since retired or moved outside of finance
- Does not support a streamlined enterprise planning process, relying on multiple external feeds for gather planning input
- Cumbersome to make plan updates spurred by changes in assumptions
03. How tech debt builds up
Tech debt doesn’t just happen - it grows gradually over time, thanks to a number of factors that all compound upon each other.
These factors can include:
Solution grows outdated
Over time, the planning solution that was implemented 5-10 years ago becomes more and more outdated. It could be that new versions of the solution have been released but the organization has not kept up to date, or solution support could be discontinued due to reduced usage as customers have migrated off the platform. If it’s based on-premise, upgrades might not be possible.
Band-aid/patchwork approach
Years of customization to address one-off requirements rather than on end-to-end processes can leave you with a patchwork of application-based and manual processes. These open you up to errors and inefficiencies.
Data/process/workflow management
Data consistency can be a problem - if a platform does not leverage master data effectively, and isn’t linked to a master data management capability. Sometimes, organizations import too much needless data into their platform (in an effort to increase accuracy) but this ends up just causing performance issues. Finally, older platforms lack sufficient audit trails and workflow capabilities to understand and manage updates/changes
04. How planning solutions have evolved
Business applications supporting planning have evolved over the past decades and can be categorized into three generations. While the following does not intend to be an all-inclusive history, it should serve as a benchmark for your organization:
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