Planning & Forecasting

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Edit Action Button

July 21, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Action buttons in IBM Planning Analytics are a great utility that allow users to recalculate a sheet, navigate to another location, or run a TurboIntegrator process. As your models evolve, you may need to periodically revise your templates to maintain their functionality. This sometimes include the action buttons.

In Perspectives, updating an action button was as simple as right-clicking on it and selecting the Properties option. In Planning Analytics, the approach is a little different.

From the task pane, click on the tab labeled “Workbook.”

This section will show you all the different Planning Analytics objects that exist in your workbook. Expand the folder labeled “Action buttons.”

The name of each action button will be prefixed with the sheet name in which it is located. Find the action button that you’d like to edit, right-click it and select the “Edit” option.

This will open the properties window where you can make changes to the action button.

This approach will allow you to quickly edit all of your action buttons at the same time instead of having to navigate through your workbook and search for each button.

IBM Planning Analytics, which TM1 is the engine for, is full of new features and functionality. Not sure where to start? Our team here at Revelwood can help. Contact us for more information at info@revelwood.com. And stay tuned for more Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks weekly in our Knowledge Center and in upcoming newsletters! You can also sign up to get our Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks sent directly to your inbox!

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Merge an Icon and a Button, Part 1

June 30, 2020 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

User experience is an important factor when designing any system. One of the most important aspects of the experience is the ease in which users can navigate from one page to another.

In situations where an IBM Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) book has multiple sheets, the navigation is as easy as clicking on the applicable sheet at the top of the page (just like you would do in Excel). However, in situations where there are multiple books, the navigation may require the use of a button.

Buttons are easy to create via the icon at the top of the screen.

The resulting button appears as a rectangle and can be formatted to change things such as the text, the color and the border.

But did you know that you can make your own button by merging an image with a button? For example, maybe you want a “home” button that looks like a house. You can do this by using an image from the shapes icon and formatting it to your desired color and size.

You can then drag a button on top of the image.

By changing the text to a blank value, the button becomes “invisible.” Users will then be able to click on the house to navigate back to the home page.

This approach offers an easy way to create an good user experience for navigation throughout your PAW books.

FP&A Done Right: What Must FP&A Do Differently to Make Planning a Success

June 5, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Adaptive Insights, written by Anders Liu-Lindberg. Lui-Lindberg explains why FP&A can no longer take a narrow view of its own role.

FP&A is obviously concerned with financials; however FP&A can no longer take a narrow view of its own role. FP&A must go way beyond the financials to where the business happens to succeed in making planning a success!

We discussed in my previous post the notion of active planning and made it concrete using a specific example. Now we’ll take it one step further and discuss how you can only realize active planning if you integrate your planning process with business operations.

In the end we’ll tie it all together by explaining how you can now build a driver-based planning process that ties your strategic intent together with your daily execution. I know that’s a stretch to most FP&A professionals, but with active planning it doesn’t make sense any other way than to make your planning driver-based.

External factor to business drivers to financial drivers

I think we can all agree that business doesn’t start with financials. In fact, it ends with financials, when every transaction eventually gets recorded through debit/credit. So how could we ever start our planning process with the financials or think that by extrapolating current financials with a growth factor or similar that we would get a decent picture of what will happen in the future? No, we must flip our thoughts on planning around. Here’s how:

We must look at the external factors that impact our business and are documented as critical assumptions as part of our strategy
Next, we must look at the key business drivers that determine if we’re successful or not
Only then do we start to look at the financials, because they’re the most lagging indicator we have

In short, external factors are leading indicators to business drivers, which in turn are leading indicators to financial drivers. Now it’s important that you only select the most critical ones, say six to eight in each category, because otherwise you’ll have a hard time describing how each factor/driver impacts the other. You’ll also have a hard time producing any meaningful monitoring system or planning process.

It’s clear that the more variables you can add to the equation the more precise you’ll likely be; however, to exercise active planning, an 80/20 approach is much better than thinking you need 99% accuracy in everything you do.

Almost real-time driver-based planning

Now let’s connect the dots. You’ve defined six to eight drivers at each level of external, business, and financial. You should now connect these drivers so you have an idea about how a change in one will change the other. You might need to use some machine learning to build a proper model, but once it’s built, you just need to link the financial drivers to your P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow (depending on how much detail you want to plan for).

Now this is real active driver-based planning that essentially gives you an updated view on your business whenever something happens in your critical assumptions that are tied to your strategy. I can imagine an alarm bell going off in every CXO’s office every time any of the drivers moves outside the comfort zone. Luckily for the CFO though, sharing the financial impact of not acting is no longer a headache.

How does this compare to your own vision for creating an active planning process? Have you already started some sort of driver-based planning? How connected is it among the three levels? Now is the time to get this done so we can start to focus on making the right decisions given the change in assumptions. Are you on board with the needed change?

Anders Liu-Lindberg is a senior finance business partner at Maersk and the co-founder of the Business Partnering Institute. He is also the co-author of the book Create Value as a Finance Business Partner and a longtime finance blogger with more than 33,000 followers.

This blog post was originally published by Adaptive Insights.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Using Words and Numbers Together

June 2, 2020 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

In an IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks video, I demonstrated the concept of using words to manipulate your views. This approach also applies to entering data. All of you know that you can enter data by typing a number into a writeable cell.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Using Words and Numbers

Some of you know that you can use commands such as “2k” to enter a value that will be converted into a number.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips: Using Words and Numbers

And some of you also know that you can type commands such as “grow10” on an existing number to populate the rest of the year.

IBM Planning Analytics Tricks: Using Words and Numbers

But did you know that you can merge all of this together into a single entry? For example, if I type “5kgrow20” in January then 5,000 will be input into January and a 20 percent growth rate will apply to each of the other months.

Using words and numbers in IBM Planning Analytics

The combination of numbers and phrases in a single cell will help you quickly and easily create plans for multiple time periods.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: New Excel Feature – Map Charts

May 5, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

One of the new features in Excel is the ability to create Map Charts to compare values and show categories across geographical regions.

If you have your own set of data to use skip to step 3. Otherwise, we can accomplish this in a few easy steps using one of Excel’s preset geographical data types:

Once you have your list of geographical values, navigate to the Data Tab > Data Types > Geography.
An option to insert data will appear. This will offer several preset options that will be automatically populated once selected.
Now that data is populated the Map Chart can be created. Highlight your table, navigate to the Insert Tab > Charts > Maps > Filled Map. A Map Chart will now be created

This is a nifty feature in Excel that will help visualize your data. Remember, this feature is already built-in to Planning Analytics Workspace! Learn more about this in our earlier blog post on displaying data in maps.

FP&A Done Right: Traditional Budgeting is a Challenge

May 1, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, written by Gary Cokins. Cokins explains why traditional budgeting is no longer adequate for most companies.

Traditional budgeting is simply too slow and too rigid to keep up with today’s rapidly changing business environment. There is great volatility, complexity, and uncertainty in the future. Gone are the days when budgets could be one-and-done — tied to a fixed point in time and too inflexible to adjust to quickly changing business opportunities and challenges. In today’s world, a startup can be up and running and profitable in three months and disrupt its competitors. Consider Uber and Airbnb as examples. If your company takes nearly as long to develop an annual budget, it will be extremely difficult to fight off the upstarts or keep up with your established competitors.

The solution? A flexible, continuous budgeting and forecasting process that helps you anticipate change and focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Rolling financial forecasts are emerging as a valuable planning method to augment the annual budget.

Here are five tips to modernize your budget process:

Tip 1 – Just say no to one-and-done

Now more than ever, December’s fiscal year-end budget numbers often bear little resemblance to July’s realities—requiring more streamlined, accurate, and responsive budgets and forecasts. Annual budgeting won’t go away, but spending weeks and months processing data and reconciling spreadsheets that are out of date soon after the consolidated master budget is published doesn’t cut it anymore.

Modern budget solution:
● Increase the frequency of budgets and forecasts to reflect shifting business conditions
● Make decisions and plans based on data-backed insights rather than old and stale information
● Change how resources are allocated throughout the year and how it incorporates real-time opportunities and challenges

Tip 2 – Focus on business drivers, not cost centers

Traditional budgeting focuses on allocating resources to cost centers, but business objectives (e.g., projects, products, service lines) are cross-functional with end-to-end business processes. By assigning resources to projects and processes, budgets and forecasts reflect company-wide versus cost-center specific performance.

Modern budget solution:
● Enable organization-wide access to reports and data that allows everyone to have visibility into project-level and process-level performance
● Review forecasts against project and process budgets to eliminate confusion among competing departments
● Provide real-time information for the needed insights to support better decision-making at all levels of the organization

Tip 3 – Create rolling forecasts

More than ever, fluctuating market conditions make accurate forecasts extremely challenging. Rolling financial forecasts help manage funds and provide visibility into business performance using time horizons that reflect the speed of your business.

Modern budget solution:
● Generate rolling financial forecasts that accommodate real-time shifts in market conditions
● Enable self-service reporting so everyone in the organization can measure their performance against companywide KPIs
● Help everyone understand the downstream effects of their resource allocation decisions

Tip 4 – Look forward, not back

Most budgets and forecasts are outdated before you push “publish” or soon afterward. And some factors are impossible to take into account (natural disasters, broken supply chains, work stoppages). The rear-view mirror orientation of traditional budgeting (last year’s actuals create this year’s budgets) can’t keep up with the speed of modern business. Look through the windshield.

Modern budget solution:
● Respond faster to shifts in market conditions with real-time access to financials
● Adjust outdated budgets and forecasts as change occurs
● Move leadership discussions toward insight, planning, and action, rather than using the budget as a cost control mechanism

Tip 5 – Use the right tools for the job

Creating a budget process that keeps up with the pace of today’s business requires a comprehensive, collaborative, and continuous planning platform—one that gives you robust, accessible reporting and modeling capabilities; dashboards that provide visibility into overall company performance; and automated tools that streamline budgeting and forecasting processes.

Modern budget solution:
● Enable comprehensive planning that aligns the priorities and actions of everyone across the organization around common KPIs
● Create opportunities for collaboration by giving everyone access to the data they need and deserve
● Adjust and update budgets and forecasts on a continuous basis so you can navigate volatile market conditions in real time

Don’t let traditional budgeting lock you into outdated assumptions and fixed targets. Some managers view the fiscal year budget as a “contract” with handcuffs that they cannot get out of to minimize unfavorable variances from their allotted cost center budget expenses. This short-term focus jeopardizes the longer-term view. The modern FP&A professional knows the truth: Aligning budgets and forecasts with comprehensive plans lays the groundwork for proactive rather than reactive planning—a significant strategic advantage in today’s highly competitive environment.

Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) systems. He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management LLC. Gary can be reached at gcokins@garycokins.com

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Sparklines

April 28, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Are you familiar with Sparklines, a rarely used feature in Excel?

What happens when you’d like to provide a visual representation of data but don’t necessarily want, or have the space, for a big chart? Sparklines may be a viable solution.

To add a Sparkline for data, follow these steps:

Once you have your data, navigate to the Insert Tab > Sparklines. In this scenario a Line Sparkline will be used but there are also options for Column and Win-Loss Sparklines.
Once selected, a dialogue box will show two fields:
1. A. Data Range – Data that will appear in the Sparkline
2. B. Location Range – Where the Sparkline will be placed
After filling out the necessary fields, a Sparkline will be created, and the Sparkline Tab will appear. This provides several options to change the appearance of a Sparkline.

Implementing Sparklines is a very easy and effective way to visualize data without the need for charts.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Bulk Load Template for Cubes with Indices

April 21, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Do you have cubes in your IBM Planning Analytics (PA) model that allow for planning with line item detail? The struggle you may come across in creating a template in Excel that automatically loads to the next available line is that such a template will either not allow you to load in bulk or requires you to load to only one center or account combination at a time. Using PA’s Quick Report, you can create an input template that solves both obstacles.

In implementing a Quick Report load template solution, you must include a Count measure in your cube to track which indices are currently used.

Create your Quick Report so that the Index dimension and other dimensions that constitute a unique index row are in the rows and the other dimensions are in the columns. In the example below, every new item entered for a center will require its own index row. The Measure, Version, and Time dimensions are in the columns.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips: How to Bulk Load Cubes with Indices

In the first row, hard-code a dummy line that will not be included in reporting or will not receive any inputs. The reason for this is that a Quick Report always needs at least one data row to maintain the connection to the cube. You can format this row and change the row height to have it appear as a thick border to your users.

IBM Planning Analytics Tricks: Bulk Load Templates for Cubes with Indices

Lastly, for every row that you’d like to be a part of the load area, populate the Index column with a formula that will determine the next row number by pulling the Count measure of “Total Index” for the center, adding the number of times the center appears in the rows above the current row, and add one to increment to the next index.

You can hide the Index column as this column will no longer be controlled by the user.

FP&A Done Right: Spreadsheets are Outdated

April 17, 2020 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

This is a guest blog post from our partner Workday Adaptive Planning, written by Adaptive Insights’ Founder Rob Hull. It was originally published on FEI Daily.

The global marketplace is moving faster, requiring companies to be more agile than ever in this age of urgency. Yet businesses—and specifically finance teams—still rely on tools that sustained them decades ago. Those tools were designed for an age when planning was an annual, top-down and linear process, but today we no longer have the luxury of devoting an average of 77 days to develop an annual plan. Change is continuous, so planning must be too. And it must also be more collaborative.

The rapid change in our technological ecosystem is causing a growing number of finance chiefs to tell their staff to find tools better suited to modern business planning and analysis than spreadsheets — for decades the default planning application for virtually every business. The inconveniences of spreadsheets for planning and analysis, such as version control errors stemming from manual data entry, clumsy email collaboration, and the challenges of creating a single source of truth from disparate data sources can now be a distant memory thanks to modern planning tools. As Bernard Marr observed in Forbes, spreadsheets may still be a great choice for some tasks, but not for the kind of agile planning and analytics required in today’s fast paced business environment.

From the cloud, a different way to plan

These and other observers have pointed to the rise of cloud-based planning software that has taken the fundamental capabilities of the noble spreadsheet and turned them into something that spreadsheets never quite managed to be – automated, intuitive, collaborative, integrated, multi-dimensional, and always up to date. Just as cloud-based CRM applications like Salesforce.com replaced legacy applications like Siebel, so too are cloud planning solutions replacing spreadsheets and legacy applications to provide much needed agility in today’s era of urgency.

Spreadsheets are a wonderful personal productivity tool, and as such will continue to have a place among business applications. But for company-wide finance, sales, and workforce planning, reporting and analysis, the future will look different than the past.

The future of planning is unfolding

With the advancement in technology, we’re starting to see menial tasks accomplished through automation, making time for teams to spend on high value tasks. Finance execs report that, on average, 83 percent of their staff’s time is spent on manual, menial tasks like data input and consolidation. That’s lost time that could be converted to more valuable and strategic tasks with better tools for planning, reporting and analysis.

Pinsent Masons LLP, a UK-based law firm with offices throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia, found that swapping out spreadsheets for cloud-based planning, reporting and analysis helped automate previously manual tasks, freeing finance staff to be more strategic. “We spent 70 percent of our time entering and verifying data, and 30 percent viewing and interpreting it,” notes Andrew Brett, who heads financial reporting at Pinsent Masons. “We now can spend seven out of every 10 hours gleaning insight from our data.”

Meanwhile, anytime, anywhere access and intuitive application design make planning far more collaborative. Spreadsheets are great for individual users, but in small groups, they’re less great and in large groups, they’re abysmal. On the other hand, cloud solutions were built for collaboration. They allow any authorized participant to work on a plan, from anywhere, at any time. Better still, you’ll always know who made changes and when. Leading cloud vendors have introduced intuitive planning interfaces that make it easy for non-finance personnel to collaborate, enter data, create reports, and run what-if scenarios because they recognize that in business, everybody plans.

Organizations that make the digital transformation leap for planning will see gains in scale and speed. The spreadsheet wasn’t built for enterprise scale, but the cloud was – modern cloud-based planning solutions can support thousands of concurrent users and highly complex multi-dimensional models. Modern solutions are also built to address the performance demands of enterprises. The most advanced cloud planning software solutions use powerful modeling engines that add memory and compute resources when needed and remove the data limits finance pros have come to despise.

Teams can also access data from every corner of the business. Manually importing enterprise data into spreadsheets can be complicated and troublesome — and that’s being polite. In contrast, the best cloud platforms automatically integrate data from your ERP, HCM, CRM and other transactional data sources so that you can refresh data with a single click and know you are working with the latest information.

Mind the gap

There’s a dangerous gap that can emerge when companies rely on outdated processes while their competitors embrace new, more agile ways of working. Agile teams produce market-leading results. The gap yawns even wider for companies still relying on tools developed for the way businesses operated before the internet changed…well, everything.

Holistic company-wide planning isn’t the pipe dream it once was – it’s now a business imperative and it’s the key to unlocking the kind of agility that turns planning into a competitive advantage. Realizing this, more and more execs are coming to the same conclusion: On the journey to the future, spreadsheets for business planning have become as archaic as the Rolodex.

Rob Hull is the founder of Adaptive Insights, a Workday company. Rob had a vision to provide modern finance leaders with an easy-to-use SaaS-based solution to manage business performance. Today that vision is a reality for thousands of businesses around the world.

This post also appeared on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

Read additional FP&A Done Right blog posts from our partner Adaptive Insights:

FP&A Done Right: Can you Recover from Static Planning?

FP&A Done Right: How to Improve your Financial Reporting Process

FP&A Done Right: 3 Barriers to Business Agility

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Edit Action Button

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Merge an Icon and a Button, Part 1

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

FP&A Done Right: What Must FP&A Do Differently to Make Planning a Success