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Printable PDF documents describing Alight's features and customer experiences.

White Papers
Customer Stories

White Papers

Application Requirements for Rolling Forecasts — Current socio-economic trends are pressuring finance teams everywhere to make planning systems more immediate and responsive. The old way of thinking — you run a company through the once a year budget process — is on the way out in favor of new concepts and system approaches generally described as "continuous planning". The practical implementation of continuous planning is through rolling forecasts — frequent updates of financial plans that include integrating actuals data and rolling the forecast time period beyond the current fiscal year.

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.

Customer Stories

Down East Enterprises: Using Alight for Rolling Forecasts
"Being in the publishing industry, our financial model is complex incorporating many operational activity drivers... We walked out with a new operating plan in a couple of days — not in months or weeks which had been our Excel experience... Alight allows us to plan differently, to plan continuously. The critical difference is that we're making much better decisions, and that's the bottom line."

Haws Corporation: Using Alight for Budgets & Reporting
"It was easy getting into Alight. I connected with the Alight consultant. She had me up and rolling with only 20 hours of support... I could tell right away that the Alight people had thought through a lot of details that counted... Dimension filters give us insight into profitability by product and region which we weren’t getting before."

Kaiser Permanente: Using Alight for Long Range Capital Planning
"The Alight implementation team got the job done on a fast track for half the price we were quoted from national firms... During review meetings, we had top executives modifying model assumptions in real time using Alight's Key Measures interface."

Iroquois Gas Transmission System: Using Alight for Complex Scenario Analysis
"I have an ongoing job of forecasting revenues, expenses, capital spending and debt structures by capital project... but I couldn’t manage multiple scenarios across the Excel workbooks... The Alight implementation consultant was great! With only 25 hours of Alight's help, together we built an extremely sophisticated model of our business... I can now quickly move between scenarios and make maintenance changes across scenarios in a single operation."

Open Learning Exchange: Using Alight for Rapid Model Building
"I needed a tool with lots of modeling power that already incorporated structures for financial statements, dimensions and "what if" analysis... The Alight modeling environment is amazing!... I'm motivated to keep going because I see results right away. The people who built Alight have put a lot of domain experience into the software. They understand planning."

Schoolwires: Using Alight for Short and Long Range Planning
"I needed to combine current year budgeting with longer range forecasts, all in one plan file. And I needed to move fast... so I actually built the Schoolwires Alight P&L model during the trial period before I bought the software! In 2008, we closed on $12 million in growth capital... Alight was an important tool in helping us reach our funding goals."

Sales Team Live: Using Alight to Analyze Strategy
"The deal structure choices were definable, but the underlying assumptions were all over the map. The software I was looking for needed to integrate strategic choices and assumptions with pure number crunching..."