Integrating planning with analytics and automating processes are top priorities in corporate planning  

Insights from BARC and Board’s exclusive market study (part 2) 

In the first part of this blog series, we learned that the integration of planning with analytics and other performance management processes is essential to create holistic corporate management and to provide decision-makers with valuable data. In this blog post, we will learn how companies plan today and what their future priorities are.  

How are companies planning and budgeting today?  

Organizations must not underestimate the effort required to connect planning with analytics and business intelligence (BI). Many organizations today have a lot of catching up to do in this area, as the following detailed analyses clearly show. 

In many companies, planning is performed annually. Designated strategic planning with a medium to long-term planning horizon is not carried out in all organizations. Just one quarter of the companies surveyed (27 percent) have largely or completely integrated strategic and operational short-term planning. Most organizations (69 percent) currently only have partial integration or are planning to merge strategic and operational planning in the future.  

Currently, only 30 percent of the companies surveyed have largely or completely integrated financial planning with operational sub-plans. In 64 percent of organizations, integration is currently limited or planned. But isolated models with cumbersome and error–prone data transfers can no longer satisfy the requirements of today’s decision-makers.  

An important approach to achieving rapid response capability and transparency is to reduce the level of detail in planning. Companies should dispense with details and focus instead on the bigger picture using sophisticated simulations and intensive analyses to derive insights for management in a timely manner.  

However, just under a third (32 percent) have largely automated or fully integrated planning with analytics. Only 11 percent of the companies surveyed have managed to build a uniform model for plan and actual data based on the same software. On the other hand, nine out of ten companies still have to carry out time-consuming data transfers between planning and analytics for important analyses or to check the achievement of objectives. Some organizations, especially large companies, perform this data exchange automatically, but this also requires uniform master data, coordinated processes and sufficient resources to adapt and maintain the interfaces.  

Integrated planning and automation are the top priorities 

Integrating planning with analytics and automating processes with technology are top priorities for companies.  

Automation is accompanied by the use of – and investment in – modern technology and includes potential use cases such as automatic data collection from different data sources, workflows to control processes and process participants and early warning mechanisms based on thresholds. The resulting increase in speed and insight, as well as the reduction of manual effort involved in corporate planning, are a positive side effect.  

Learn more

The first part of this blog series looks at the four facets of integrated planning and analytics. 

The third part of this blog series explores why predictive planning and forecasting promises to be the future of corporate planning.