Are your planning and forecasting cycles holding your enterprise back? Welcome to the club.
Some of the world’s largest organizations still rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage their planning and forecasting. Others are using proprietary planning tools, but even they have their limits when it comes to flexibility, scalability, adoption, and ROI.
If you’ve found your team stuck in limbo, there is a way out. Leverage and extend your investment in Power BI to help your team spend less time managing planning and forecasting processes and more time adding value to the business.
What Planning and Forecasting Limbo Looks Like
If your planning and analysis strategy isn’t efficient, it will hold your enterprise back and cause stagnation (or limbo) to happen.
Planning and forecasting is not just the remit nor the burden of your finance team—it also is an essential process that affects sales, marketing, inventory planning, supply chain, and many other departments in your organization.
Using spreadsheets for planning and forecasting results in a lot of time-consuming menial labor that your team has to manage. Not only is this frustrating and non-value-generating for your team, but it also has hidden costs for your enterprise.
When people are spending long hours building spreadsheets and compiling and cleansing data, you’re doing a disservice to your most highly skilled, highly trained, highly paid team members. When they are not bogged down by inefficient processes, they’ll have more time to provide helpful insights, deliver value to stakeholders, and help drive your organization forward.
The Way Out is Power BI
You may already use Power BI for reporting, but this versatile platform is also incredibly effective for planning and forecasting, as well as any other analysis needs your enterprise has.
Time Savings
One of the biggest reasons to use Power BI for planning and forecasting is its efficiency.
You’re already using Power BI for reporting and analytics, so why not take on the whole thing with this one tool?
When using Excel or other proprietary planning tools, your planning cycles are more extended—in part due to the fact that you’re still having to extract, massage, and integrity-check your data from one system to another.
At Collectiv, we’ve helped clients implement Power BI to bring those extended processes down to something that can be automated. Power BI’s advanced automation features mean that many tasks are completed with the push of a button, so your team no longer has to spend hours of their day on data collection, collation, and manual intervention.
Single Version of Truth
Proprietary planning tools are more efficient than using spreadsheets, but there’s still one glaring challenge…a single version of truth for your data. When data is spread out across different tools, used by multiple departments, and touched by many people, this is a major challenge.
Ultimately, you end up with multiple versions of the same data, which generates confusion and undermines credibility. With Power BI, your team has access to all data in one place so they can easily leverage insights to make more intelligent decisions that drive enterprise success.
It’s Time to Get Out of Limbo
The last few years have proved that organizations can’t stay in this reactive state of always chasing their tail and being stuck in limbo. You need insights quickly and easily so you can get where you need to go…planning and forecasting nirvana.
Whether you are currently on a spreadsheet-based planning system or off-the-shelf software for planning, we highly recommend that you look at handling your planning and forecasting within Power BI.
If you need guidance with planning and forecasting, our talented team has you covered.
At Collectiv, we provide Power BI training designed with your enterprise team in mind, whether you’re just getting started with Power BI or want to level up your existing Power BI skills. If you’re looking for flexible support or help with a specific longer-term project, we also offer Consulting as a Service and staff augmentation.
