Integrate between planning models and with actuals

Integrating planning models — that is, ensuring a consistent flow of assumptions and linking between strategic plans, budgets and rolling forecasts — is always a challenge. Alight Planning incorporates features that let you work seamlessly with all three plans types — plus integration of actuals into any of the three plan types: 

• Market planning — Alight includes structures for market and product planning that allow you to set up activity models with complex linking as backup for the revenue plan. You can do this by product, channel, region, customer type or by using industry specific drivers. Such market planning can be directly incorporated into operating plans — e.g. relating marketing budgets for lead generation to the sales funnel; using product volumes to drive sales staffing; etc.
• Levels of detail vary between strategic plans, budgets and rolling forecasts — for example, different time horizons, consolidation points and modeling structures. With Alight, you can easily incorporate long range plans into the same file as budgets and rolling forecasts. Using the operating budget as a foundation for rolling forecasts is automatic — both plan types are created using Alight's timeframe and scenario tools. Both reside in the same file.
• Integrating actuals into financial plans is usually a mess. 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. Alight solves these problems with a sophisticated system mapping design that allows import of financial and operating actuals data into plan files from virtually any database structure.