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The enterprise planning process – planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting – presents a formidable challenge to most companies, regardless of size or industry. Enterprise planning is a crucial component of financial management that contributes greatly to a company’s overall success or failure, especially in these uncertain economic times. Despite its importance, planning is often seen as burdensome and time-consuming. Yet forward-thinking organisations see planning as offering enormous opportunities.

Leading companies address planning obstacles and improve processes. They take advantage of new technologies and employ planning and orecasting best practices. They are quickly rewarded with more accurate plans, more timely re-forecasts and more effective decision-making. Overall, these tools and practices save time, reduce errors, promote enterprise-wide collaboration and foster a disciplined financial management culture that delivers true competitive advantage often accompanied by a leading or stable market position.

Specially, such companies are able to:

• Consistently deliver more timely, reliable and flexible plans
• Strengthen the link between strategic objective and operational and financial plans
• Improve communication and collaboration among managers
• Enhance strategic decision-making, enabling leaders to more quickly identify, analyse and forecast the impact of changes as they occur

The goal of this guide is to help enterprises take the first step toward improved budgeting, planning and forecasting. This guide outlines a systematic approach to software evaluation and selection that aligns best practices and leading-edge technology with planning activities in an organisation.

Source: IBM

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