Strategic Plans

Most strategic financial plans are developed using spreadsheets and most have the same problems — cell formulas too difficult to trace, inputs spread across multiple sheets, links too easy to break, and structures too difficult to maintain.

Alight Planning solves these problems and lets you create complex financial models in 80% less time — with fewer errors and with a seamless transition between strategy and budgets.

Translate strategy into financial models
Evaluate strategy using sensitivity analysis and scenarios
Convert strategy models into budgets and forecasts

Translate strategy into financial models

"Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value."

Michael Porter, strategy guru
"What is strategy", Harvard Business Review, Oct-Dec 1996

Alight Planning is activity-based planning, the fundamental tool for translating strategy into a financial model. With spreadsheets, strategic thinking and financial models are typically detached. With Alight, strategy and finance are interactively linked.

• Underlying assumptions about activities and the costs or prices of each should drive the strategic financial model. In spreadsheets, such assumptions are spread over across multiple worksheets or workbooks. In Alight, they are integrated and linked: you change and monitor assumptions from one plan file with complete visibility into underlying activity units and rates.
• Activity-driver relationships — Activity based planning is about creating an interactive financial model that lets you build and modify complex structures and observe the financial impacts. In spreadsheets, building structures with formulas takes time; changing structures nearly always creates errors. Alight's intuitive architecture and unique interface for linking makes it fast to create activity driver relationships and safe to make changes.
• Rolling up details to financial statements — How often have you heard (or said) this: "That's a good question... let me update the spreadsheet and get back to you..."? With Alight, you can identify and make changes in real time with instant updating of the activity model and roll ups to the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow.

Evaluate strategy using sensitivity analysis and scenarios

Understanding the sensitivity of assumptions and constructing scenarios that depict alternate outcomes are critical activities to evaluating and refining a strategic financial model:

• Sensitivity analysis is the process of changing individual assumptions to understand impacts on a financial model. You do this to focus market research and operational resources. Sensitivity analysis is critical to strategic planning and difficult at best in spreadsheets because the inputs you test are spread across multiple worksheets. Alight has built-in sensitivity analysis tools — for any target such as sales or profits, Alight generates a list of input assumptions ranked by the amount of the financial impact on the target.
• Scenario analysis is the process of changing a series of assumptions and measuring the impact on profits, capital requirements and other measures. Scenario analysis is particularly important for testing impacts of alternate timing of milestones such as completing a product development — a difficult and error-prone process with spreadsheets. Alight Incorporates a broad range of tools for scenario analysis.

Convert strategy models into budgets and forecasts

Alight Planning integrates strategic plans with operational budgets and forecasts. In the world of spreadsheets, varying plan structures make the process difficult at best, if not impossible. With Alight, integration is built into its very structure.

• Market planning — Spreadsheets typically incorporate models for revenues by product, region, channel and customer types across multiple workbooks with a disparate structures separate from expense and capital budgets. With Alight, it's seamless.
• Levels of detail vary between strategic plans and budgets: longer time horizons for strategic planning; different line item and modeling structures for each; and different rollups to financial statements. With Alight, you can roll back and forth between levels of detail.
• Accounting structures drive the budget process — revenue categories, cost centers, and natural class accounts. Accounting structures are at odds with strategic plans based on activity drivers that have no accounting reference. As a consequence with spreadsheet planning, budgets and strategic models don't talk. Alight bridges the two structures for integrated and consistent planning.