How connected planning software helps your strategy succeed

How many strategy days have you been on? Leaders often go offsite so they can think laterally and not be disturbed. So much emphasis is placed on strategy that the implementation of strategic business planning gets overlooked. This is often the case if the strategy is not linked to the budget or resources are not distributed correctly. One of the key reasons strategies don’t work is because business leaders don’t review the implementation or business performance frequently enough. Where does your business sit with monitoring the success of your strategy?

According to 20 years of strategy research conducted by Bridges Business Consulting leaders habitually underestimate the implementation challenges and employees struggle to understand the right actions to implement strategy. This is why we are advocating the need for software to connect strategy, operational planning, budgeting and reporting so your monitoring is easy and automatic. The software helps everyone to see how the business is performing so they can strive for excellence and be in control of their productivity.

It is often the finance team’s role to dissect the strategy and support the business where it needs to go. This results in working with different teams and to gauge their priorities, so software helps to streamline and manage these discussions. A BI and FP&A platform like Phocas facilitates real-time collaboration and enables the integration of financial and sales data which is a fundamental requirement to managing the planning process. So when finance needs confirmation from the sales team about sales targets, headcount and margins for various products to help with line-of-business allocations, the data is available for stakeholders to use or challenge. The built-in workflows enable the finance team to communicate directly with different business partners confidentiality and there is an audit trail so others picking up the model can understand the integrated business planning decision-making.

The finance team puts in place a budget and various forecasts, considering what all the business units require in terms of workforce planning, inventory and infrastructure to reach the agreed goals. The planning solution replicates this as an implementation plan to guide people through the strategy and deliver performance management reports.

The Phocas Financial Planning and Analysis and BI platform allows business people to connect financial reporting, business planning and analytics. When everyone in a business has access to performance figures it facilitates better decisions. People know how they’re travelling against their priorities so they are energized. When you know what's going well in the business and what needs to be worked on, then everyone is clear. No one wastes time. There is no dispute about what is working in your business environment or where people should focus this month or the next.

Easy to use planning software is key

In the recent BARC planning survey 26, it was reported that Phocas is used for budgeting by 96% of people surveyed and 95% ease of use was very good or good. When selecting software, a high adoption rate usually means that the product is easy to use or the user experience is good. The implementation has worked well so people trust the data and analysis - so they use it.

The real-time single source of data in Phocas, allows finance to carry out both management reporting and statutory financial reporting. It also allows you to do three-way forecasting to get a complete understanding of your financial health including cash forecasting. Three-way forecasting is achievable when building a budget model in Phocas because you benefit from a smooth connection with Financial Statements. Mini drivers are an easy way to represent the links between your statements when using 3-way forecasting. You use the mini drivers to forecast or budget your Balance Sheet items, so your Cashflow better reflects reality. Mini drivers help make many changes to your Balance Sheet and within Phocas three out-of-the-box templates cover common scenarios for debtors, creditors and stock. These templates have pre-built lines with basic inputs for calculations.

Implementing planning software in your organization offers many benefits for successful strategy implementation, chief among them being enhanced collaboration. In many workplaces teams continue to work in silos, with limited interaction and knowledge sharing and using their own data in spreadsheets.

Planning software like Phocas BI and FP&A improves business processes by helping people to share and use the same information, allowing people to work together and on the same budget targets and performance figures. Soon the issue of not having the time to check the implementation of strategy goes away primarily by automating routine tasks. Manual reporting processes are time-consuming especially if different teams or branches want to review different metrics, diverting valuable resources from the finance team. The Phocas BI and FP&A software monitors each planning cycle and the performance updates are automatic to your daily operations. Features like dashboards of actuals vs budgets and key metrics of your supply chain performance help people reach sales targets and problem-solve. This not only improves responsiveness but boosts morale as everyone is more connected and involved in achieving organizational goals. Finance teams also get some time back to use other features in the software to carry out planning capabilities like demand planning and improve their forecast accuracy.

Human centered planning software like Phocas connects teams and empowers people to communicate more effectively. When people have access to the right tools and real-time data they can quickly spot issues with the implementation of the strategy, they can make these known and make suggestions for how they might be able to better manage market conditions or reach specific goals.