Disruptive innovation, new business models, and globalization have accelerated the rate of change for every business. Since change is the new normal, businesses that rapidly plan and adapt to changes will remain ahead of the curve.

Why enterprise planning is critical

The greatest waste in business is doing the wrong thing well — Henry Ford

As decisions can make or break a company, planning becomes a critical component for enterprises to deliver quick and accurate decisions based on insights across business operations. Planning adds value to every single business outcome, including sales creation, cost reduction, resource optimization, the anticipation of the right opportunity, and brings effective corporate governance and accountability in enterprises.

When agility counts more than ever

The paradigm is shifting from ‘strategic planning’ to ‘strategic agility’. Strategic planning is a well-defined process and framework based on the assumption that the global economy and market conditions will remain static, while Strategic agility is an innovative and iterative planning process of ‘creating market’ rather than ‘adjusting to the Total Addressable Market’.

As change is inevitable, agility in planning becomes the key to survive and thrive in today’s volatile market. Enterprises need agile business processes and tools that allow them to adapt and change in response to changing market and business conditions. Enterprises that have developed what-if modeling capabilities to predict and dynamically respond to changing market conditions have achieved strategic agility in their planning process. CPM offers a platform to manage their agile processes, revise their business plans and operations on a more frequent basis to stay relevant and competitive.

• Plan across the Enterprise: Enterprises can no longer operate based on siloed, static plans with outdated business assumptions. The modern EPMs like Anaplan, Oracle, Adaptive Insights create a single source of truth and visibility into the enterprise data and enables collaborative, real-time planning with a perfect synergy between Finance, Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, HR, and Operations plans.
• Planning in real-time: Enterprises need to quickly revise their strategies, implement plans, monitor results, and make timely decisions. With cloud-based EPMs, they can perform real-time analysis of data, evaluate the performance of planning, and do early detection of issues, if any, to enhance and improvise on the plans on-time. Enterprises that transformed their strategy from the ‘planning cycle’ to ‘continuous planning process’ have mastered the winning formula in this changing world.

No scope for bad data

When data is critical for business operations, high-quality and connected data becomes essential to ensure the effectiveness of plans and decisions. Enterprises must validate their data throughout the planning process to ensure planning based on certified data. Data reconciliation and data quality monitoring can help increase confidence in planning outcomes.

Embed Intelligence into Planning

• Bring precision with the smart prediction: The entire gamut of planning leans to data-driven intelligence. Not only the plans but the tools that enable planning must be intelligent too. That’s why modern enterprises are turning to Intelligent EPMs that can work in tandem with AI-ML to drive data-driven decisions such as launching the right product at the right time into the market, implementing new business models, and delivering exceptional experiences for customers.
• Augment planning with automation:Enterprises are harnessing the power of RPA in EPM planning processes. Bots can easily log into the planning systems, run and download reports, email the reports to users, and can save hours for the planning staff by accelerating the process and executing it correctly, allowing room for more efficient and meaningful activities.

Want to power up your Enterprise Planning game?

Plan to the cadence of your business with  Enquero! Data, Analytics, and Planning is our forte. By leveraging the power of advanced analytics, which involves predictive analytics and spans to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), we make intelligent planning real within enterprises to accelerate data awareness, improve the accuracy of expected outcomes and augment decision-making.

Imagine a future where collaborating with bots for planning is just a click away!