Company-wide planning.
Traditional planning usually happens in two disconnected streams.
At the top, finance owns the big picture, making strategic calls without the cross-functional visibility to understand the holistic business reality.
At the bottom, discrete business unit managers use siloed datasets stored in siloed systems to make siloed decisions about their short- to mid-term goals.
The main shortcoming of this model is that it can’t produce a unified picture of business drivers, activities, and performance. And it’s that unified picture that unlocks real business agility.
That’s why the enterprises accelerating fastest recognize FP&A as just one flavor of planning. In modern planning, FP&A has evolved to become extended planning and analysis (xP&A), seeing every department across the company realize value.
To guide this evolution, enterprises must empower departments across the business to participate in a single collaborative, fluid planning process.
XP&A leverages the wealth of rich planning data already flowing throughout the business. Not just financial data but operational data, transactional data, workforce data and project data, which feeds better decision-making and outcomes across the enterprise.
Here We Are
"By 2024, 70% of all new financial planning and analysis projects will become extended planning and analysis (xP&A) projects, extending their scope beyond the finance domain into other areas of enterprise planning and analysis.”
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions, Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, 6 October 2020
Let’s look at how this extended company-wide planning works, and why it’s so powerful.
Workforce planning.
Your people are the execution engine for every business operation in the company—they’re fundamental to your ability to navigate disruption. That means modern workforce planning lays the groundwork for company-wide planning and by extension, business agility.
That’s not only about reconciling the definitions of “headcount” planning finance does and “workforce” planning HR does. And this isn’t just a case of upskilling in certain areas and downsizing in others.
True agility means being empowered to change the identity and culture of the company if that’s what’s needed.
When HR and finance form a close strategic partnership, you can combine granular workforce data with the wider business perspective in real time. Workforce planning becomes dynamically aligned with your evolving business reality to build the workforce that’s best placed to meet your strategic goals and react faster to change.
“Our team works closely with department leaders and HR to consistently analyze the cost of our workforce and plan for the future. With strategic workforce planning from [Workday Adaptive Planning], we now have the opportunity to do advanced skills-based planning, ensuring our workforce is continually aligned with the transformation of our business. Director FP&A, Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)
Learn how Workday Adaptive Planning for the workforce gives you the flexibility and Operational planning.
Planning already happens in every operational area. Every business unit leader makes decisions daily in service of better performance.
But those decisions happen in silos. Data is stored in disparate spreadsheets, isolated point solutions, and disconnected systems. The tools driving day-to-day operations can’t reconcile operational data with the financial plan or with other related operational areas, let alone continuously recalibrate toward agility.
The result is that operational planning becomes totally disconnected from financial and strategic planning. Actions taken at the departmental level make sense in isolation, but are they the best actions for the business as a whole?
By integrating both financial and non-financial data from across the business into a centralized system, everyone gains visibility into how change happens across the organization. So operational decision-makers are always making decisions in service of holistic enterprise acceleration.
Sales and demand planning are two subsets of operational planning that have an especially huge impact on business agility.
75% of business leaders say operational silos are a major hindrance to speed
“Marketing. Sales. Finance. Human resources . Run as distinct silos, these and other function are too big, too slow, and too expensive to be effective. They can be barriers to speed, agility, and decisiveness as each area, in turn, weighsin on key decisions. It’s something incumbents understand more and more each day: only 25% believe their company’s operating model has evolved quickly enough to align to strategy. Accenture’s “Breaking Through Functional Silos, Agility, Accenture Strategy”
Sales planning.
Sales operations are intrinsically connected to everything else across the business—the stakes are too high for sales planning to happen in a vacuum.
Imagine you’re running sales operations for a SaaS provider and you need to increase bookings. With traditional, sales-isolated planning you run the numbers and settle on a logical territory plan.
But that model is blind to any business-wide interdependencies so you forfeit cross- functional help that might boost progress toward your targets. Or worse, sales and other departments actively hinder one another by working with limited insight and outdated data.
Integrating sales planning into a company-wide planning mechanism aligns the whole business around the best outcomes to power unified acceleration over isolated breakaways.
Demand planning.
Accurate, agile demand planning is essential to maintaining supply chain efficiency, protecting customer satisfaction, and maximizing profitability. But demand is hard to predict and can change fast because it’s vulnerable to so many factors outside your control.
Improving demand planning—to power leaner inventory and lower costs while maintaining seamless customer service—demands better tools.
Spreadsheet-based processes are far too unwieldy to be reliable, while traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has little value as a predictive tool.
Instead, modern demand planning hinges on comprehensive, real-time insights pulled from across the business and, as AI and machine learning evolve, from external factors such as your competitors, the market, and global events.
To get there, you need a dedicated built-for-purpose planning tool that ingests data continuously and in real time.
The Time is Now.
Embracing modern planning practices is no longer optional but essential for businesses aiming to thrive in today’s fast-paced and unpredictable environment.
By adopting continuous, company-wide, and cloud-first planning strategies, organizations can unlock unprecedented agility and resilience.
As we navigate through an era of constant change, those who invest in advanced planning technologies and methodologies will not only keep pace but lead the way.
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