Brovanture

Integrated Business Planning Consulting

The core benefit to an Integrated Business Planning approach is about improving forecasting speed and accuracy. Organisations can no longer solely rely on the annual budget to guide their resource allocations and investment decisions, as the speed of change in today's business environment requires more dynamic and flexible budgeting, planning and forecasting processes.

How it looks in Oracle Hyperion

In support of this, many organisations are supplementing the annual budget process with quarterly or monthly forecasts and in some cases rolling forecasts, that extend four to six quarters into the future.

Businesses are also moving from disconnected spreadsheets to web-based planning solutions that automate and streamline the planning and forecasting process.

Brovanture provides solutions for Integrated Business Planning utilising two key Oracle options:

• Hyperion Planning in conjunction with Hyperion Essbase
• or Hyperion Planning in conjunction with Demantra, the market leading solution for Supply Chain Planning

Brovanture's trademarked Prepare2PLAN® "Integrated Business Planning" (IBP) links financial plans and metrics to operational plans from manufacturing, supply chain, sales, marketing and other functions to create an integrated business planning framework, enabling fact-based decision making.

It addresses a range of high-value planning processes, typically solved with offline spreadsheets, such as:

• integrated revenue and profit planning
• cost of goods sold (COGS) modelling
• product allocation
• stock keeping unit (SKU) rationalisation

Prepare2PLAN® IBP enables planners within finance and operating functions to collaboratively change operational and financial assumptions, re-evaluate planning scenarios, assess business impact and update the plan of record.

However, such an approach requires investment in enabling technology that provides for collaborative working, enhanced productivity through work-flow and data management tools which maintain consistency of data quality and definition across the business.

Cross-functional working also requires sophisticated modelling capability that interweaves plans and assumptions in one functional area with another, ties together operational and financial plans, resolves differences in planning granularity and enables on-demand analysis and reporting.

Enlightened companies are seeing the benefits of a cross-functional capability in which the planning effort is aligned with core business processes and integrated to the extent that planning assumptions are normalised across the enterprise.

The outcome of this is broad consensus around predicted outcomes. There is also greater assurance that operational performance is technically, operationally and financially feasible.