The Cost of NOT Achieving Connected Planning
Written by Jon Pause
When purchasing software for your organization, a large factor to consider is the cost of the entire project; and that’s understandable. You can’t determine ROI without understanding cost. You cannot maximize ROI without minimizing costs. Do your due diligence and understand implementation lengths, rate cards, and internal resource commitments. You should also tally the cloud licensing cost against the license cost, server cost, resource cost, and future upgrade costs. These are all necessary measures, but this is not the complete picture. Your organization is rife with hidden costs.
You have defined decision makers within your organization. Those decision makers need certain sets of data at particular times to manage your organization against the strategic initiatives your executives set forth. After reviewing those data sets, the decision maker may need to act on that information which undoubtedly drives another downstream decisions or impacts. The faster this process moves throughout your organization the more nimble you are. Being nimble gives you a competitive advantage.
In the roller coaster of geopolitical events, how is your organization going to react? How are you going to fend off the next revolutionary technology that makes you obsolete? Are you ready for the next recession, whenever that might be?
The inability to be nimble is a headwind your organization faces. That headwind is costing you every minute of every day. But don’t fret, it isn’t that your company failed to act. It was widely accepted that no perfect system existed, but you needed to get out of Excel to scale. EPM has always been an organizational imperative. You have to plan and track against that plan, and your company poured millions into chasing a unicorn in the SAP landscape.
SAP has pushed some form of interwoven planning since I can remember. Their ability to connect EPM to ERP made them one of superior tools for the better part of two decades. But were you really interwoven if you were unable to reach every organization or use case? Interwoven became “entangled,” which might as well be “entrapped” since you were locked into the SAP suite.
News flash! Technology has shifted. After a career working with BPC, Anaplan seems like the perfect solution. Furthermore, the speed of technical enhancements appears to come out faster, moving the needle forward at a speed unknown to those in the SAP community.
Gartner showed us time and time again that SAP, even as a leader in EPM, typically was limited to financial applications. For most companies, customer satisfaction was low, these organization should be hungry to evaluate a new tool.
Before every outlay of cash to maintain, enhance, or upgrade, before every new planning cycle and at any point where you work through a clunky work around. You need to be searching for a connected planning solution that will allow you to:
React Faster
Scenario Plan
Reduce Risk
Align Strategically
The Anaplan Honeycomb delivers these benefits through connected planning. Connected planning creates as nimble organization, and a nimble organization is an efficient organization. Maximum efficiency means you are leveraging your costs correctly. If you aren’t driving value, then those thin upfront costs are somewhat meaningless.
Accomplish this by embracing a culture of connected planning on the Anaplan platform!
About the Author
Jon has been working on advancing connected planning for over 15 years. Previously a solution architect in the SAP EPM space, Jon brought both industry insights and delivery experience to the Anaplan platform.
He is a connected planning specialist who has demonstrated the ability to adapt software tools to multiple industries, technology platforms, and business needs. Using a combination of technical knowhow, creativity in adapting cutting edge software capabilities, and the understanding that business process is a key ingredient to success Jon consistently delivers “value‐add” projects for his clients.