Alight Documents
Feature Articles
How Agile is Your Planning?
This feature article from Strategic Finance Magazine, April 2012, illustrates how to calculate the ROI of planning activities. We introduce best practices for measuring two types of possible benefits: 1) streamlining existing processes where ROI is measured by time saved and 2) introducing new planning processes where ROI is measured by increasing business value. Saving time is not enough. Making the move to Agile PlanningTM is the key to generating significant ROI.
The Planning Maturity Curve:
Where Are You? Where Do You Want to Be?
This research paper presents the Planning Maturity Curve, a framework for evaluating the level of effort and business value of your budgeting, reporting and forecasting processes. We also present guidelines for implementing Agile PlanningTM, a new planning methodology based on architectures for driver-based planning, integration of actuals and scenario analysis.
White Papers
Agile Planning for Healthcare Providers
Anticipating change and developing an effective organizational strategy to adapt is perhaps the greatest challenge healthcare executives face. With the multitude of factors affecting business operations, payment, and market dynamics in the post-reform era, traditional budget methods are no longer sufficient.
Application Requirements for Rolling Forecasts
The economic crisis is forcing hard looks at spending across the board. The old way of thinking — you run a company through the budget process — is on the way out in favor of new approaches such as "continuous planning". The practical implementation of continuous planning is through rolling forecasts.
Driver-Based Planning for Budgets & Forecasting
Learn a best practice methodology where financial plans incorporate assumptions about business activities which are modeled to drive financial data such as revenue projections, headcount, spending and capital requirements.
Escaping Excel Hell: Budgets & Forecasting
Many companies are in "Excel Hell", a continuing state of inefficiency and disruption related to using Excel for collaborative planning. The spreadsheet symptoms of Excel Hell are broken formulas, consolidations that choke, and wrong numbers. The organizational symptoms are inefficiency, frustration and decisions based on bad information.
Integrating Actuals Into Financial Plans
Integrating actuals into the planning cycle is usually a zoo. Financial and operating results are spread across multiple databases. Actual results and plan detail are at different levels. Lack of underlying volumes and rates make meaningful causal analysis difficult. You want apples to apples. Too often you get fruit salad.
Planning at the Business Unit Level
Planning at the business unit level is most commonly done in Excel with cost center inputs gathered using workbook templates that are difficult to format and consolidate. While business units can't escape from "Excel Hell" using a corporate BPM system, they can streamline planning and analysis processes with Alight Planning.
