Improve decision-making with the right planning and analytics tools
There’s a massive buzz around the transformative power of big data, business intelligence (BI) and analytics. As these technologies advance in leaps and bounds, the single most important benefit of these tools is getting lost in the headlines. After all, the focus should be less on what the technology can do, but what it supports us to do better - generate reliable, timely information to help us make faster, more-informed decisions.
It’s not just finance that reaps the benefits either, powerful forecasting tools can be leveraged across Finance, HR, Operations, IT, Sales and Marketing. From C level executives to marketing, sales and operation managers – when everyone at every level of an organisation has access to insights, they can be empowered to make better decisions.
Below we describe the key capabilities of IBM Planning Analytics and how this solution can help your organisation overcome traditional challenges while giving your people access to business insights that will steer business performance more effectively.
The future of business forecasting
Unfortunately, most organisations are cobbling together manual, disconnected systems or continuing to lean too heavily on spreadsheets to manage their planning activities. Clunky, time-intensive systems, delivering plans, budgets, forecasts and reports are contributing to a lengthy, resource-consuming processes. The data collected is often inaccurate, infrequently gathered and not timely. This all adds up to inaccurate and unreliable forecasts and reduced alignment across teams and departments.
For organisations looking to undertake a BI initiative, today’s planning and analytics tools offer powerful capabilities that provide access to visibility into all organisational data. This allows you to identify and understand patterns and relationships in data to reveal why things happen, and what might happen in the future, enabling users to make business decisions with confidence.
The journey towards smarter business forecasting
If you want to tie insight to action across all areas of your company - from sales and marketing to finance, operations and HR - the powerful budgeting, forecasting and analysis capabilities of IBM Planning Analytics is the perfect fit. Business performance can be profoundly impacted when this platform is paired to your business goals. This includes:
Greater agility
By bridging operations and finance IBM Planning Analytics offers continuous and integrated planning capabilities, allowing a businesses to adapt quickly as business conditions change.
Big picture views
Stepping away from the traditional siloed approach, IBM Planning Analytics synchronises processes and data across the organisation, creating integrated plans that benefit all departments.
Performance at speed
A user friendly interface with self-service reporting increases adoption rates while reducing training time and costs. Reporting times are drastically reduced allowing resources to focus on more important high-value projects.
Improved Productivity
By automating manual, spreadsheet-based planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis, organisations experience improved resource productivity savings.
Better decisions
Accurate organisation-wide planning requires a fast, flexible solution that can produce deep insights. And IBM Planning Analytics certainly delivers this and more. By leveraging the platform, you can create am organisation with strategy and activity aligned, collaborative decision making and better business results.
Flexible capabilities for advanced business insights
The forecasting needs of modern organisations require an open platform built on a modern architecture and with the agility to cater for an ever-evolving business. The advanced capabilities include:
Fast performance providing real-time decision making agility
Easy-to-use web-based experience
Option to use Microsoft Excel interface
Visual analysis and reporting
Powerful modelling that supports any business requirement
Self-service exploratory analytics
Flexibility to scale and adapt to any organization change
Flexible deployment options
Secure, governed and compliant
Align planning process with corporate strategy
How Cubicus helps
Business intelligence is vital for growth, competitive advantage and true insights, successfully. But deriving value from this process requires more than just purchasing a license.
Be confident that you're making the right decisions and taking the right actions to drive your business forward with Cubicus. We help organisations get more value from their data — and make better-informed business decisions — with an integrated, holistic approach to the data and analytics lifecycle. Contact us here.