A Collaborative, Dynamic, Agile and Intelligent Approach to Connected Planning

Embrace all aspects of your business, from marketing and sales to operations and finance, in your planning today. Your workforce (people) should reflect the labor force you have today and the labor force you will need in the future. You need not only a strategic business plan but also departments that form their own plans for implementation. There is no longer an excuse for business units to stick to their own data silos, applications, and reporting. Each one of them needs a plan that aligns with the other to achieve the company’s overall objective. Plans must be collaboratively developed; they must be connected to one another.

The concept of “Connected Planning” includes more than just linking departments within an organization. Furthermore, enterprise performance management should be integrated into a plan so that it can be continuously monitored. The plan should be changed and adjusted as the business or market changes. When you continue to operate with a plan that you know will not work, you are doing the same thing you have always done, but expecting different results. That’s insanity.

You must be able to link your plan to reality.

To maximize growth and profits, the organization should have a single, comprehensive, and cohesive plan. This plan should include a financial and operational aspect. That plan includes different elements, but you need all the functions within an organization working together. In order to achieve this, each function must identify what it needs to do, without getting distracted from the ultimate goal. To accomplish this, traditionally there have been specialized tools and applications for sales, finance, human resources, and supply chain. How do you integrate them? You wind up with a disconnected plan if you don’t answer this question.

There are many pieces to this puzzle, each one fitting perfectly. A static plan will not work for doing this in functional silos. To run an organization efficiently, all parts need a common set of reliable facts to base their decisions on. To be effective, the plan has to be comprehensive, well-connected, dynamic, and collaborative.

Detail-oriented planning for corporate strategy

The level of detail needed in corporate planning is also crucial. In order to use real transactional and operational data, you need to provide an appropriate level of detail. This will reveal the interdependencies among different parts of the overall plan, which share certain elements of data. Today, if you are planning at a summary or aggregate level, you likely do not have the tools required to deal with large volumes of data quickly. We suggest replacing these tools with in-memory 64-bit technology that supports real-time modeling with large data volumes. In other words, you can use the data to plan in a very detailed way that you otherwise might not be able to.

Data analytics and machine learning

In the past, plans were based on the past. Forecasts, budgets, and plans are still largely built using historical data stored in enterprise applications. This data is just a tiny fraction of potential data that can be collected today, both internally and externally. But the vast amount of data is also an issue. How do you cope with a brain that can never possibly process all of the data in front of it? Maybe machine learning can help.

It is impossible for the human mind to sift through zettabytes, exabytes, or even terabytes of data in search of patterns that could be useful for predicting or planning. This is where machine learning comes into play. Even though your view (human) may be limited to your own sales history, computer learning knows no such boundaries. A machine can analyze an infinite amount of structured and unstructured data, then identify patterns and correlate points of data that a human does not have the intellectual capacity to comprehend. In other words, it keeps learning and connecting data as it gathers more.

As businesses move fast in today’s era of disruption, it is crucial that you have a clearly defined strategy that all parts of the organization can rally around. It is important to link the plan to corporate performance management and introduce a dynamic component to it — one that is grounded in real data and able to respond to the forces of change that impact businesses every day. It should be a highly connected plan.

Connected planning and how it is implemented

We have spent almost a decade on planning, and we have seen that companies who plan successfully keep their competition at bay. When priorities are aligned across an organization, resources are allocated more efficiently, and they remain agile in the face of market changes.

• About 86 percent of companies agree that they should collaborate more or better when making plans
• A majority of companies feel that they need to improve in at least two areas: people, processes, and technology
• According to 68 percent of companies, two or more challenges prevent them from adopting new planning methods

It is true that most of the problems plaguing companies are not confined to a single area or function. Setting up the right processes is also key. This involves the creation of a company-wide culture. The key is to hire the right people and get them to work together.

In order to make “planning” meaningful to organizations, they bring together not only data, but also people and processes from across the company, and then integrate them all to keep the entire company engaged at all times. It is therefore not surprising that 96 percent of companies feel that planning helps to align priorities across the organization.

Conclusion

Businesses are realizing that success will be in part determined by their ability to plan well and make better decisions faster when they begin to look forward to the future. Moreover, it seems to show that a priority on Connected planning solutions would have the greatest impact on connecting employees — and ideally, this priority should come from the top.