Enterprise Planning Reconsidered
Collaborative enterprise planning is a methodology that connects all planning activities of a company’s departments and business units, enabling them to share their plans and to plan collaboratively. This form of planning uses technology to rapidly assemble, analyze and report plans and budgets as well as compare results to these plans. Embracing collaborative enterprise planning delivers value. Our Next-Generation Business Planning Benchmark Research finds that companies that directly link their plans get better results than those that do not: 66% said their planning processes work well or very well compared to 40% that aggregate the information by copying and pasting rather than linking and 25% that reported little or no connection between their plans.
Technology also allows business units to plan and review the “things” that matter to executives and managers—headcount, units produced and occupancy rates, for example—in parallel with essential fiscal concerns such as revenue, expenses and cash flow. Gathering all planning activities on a single dedicated platform breaks down silos that prevent effective collaboration and supports more rapid planning cycles that promote operational agility.