Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
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SAP Integrated Business Planning
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SAP supports supply chain management with Integrated Business Planning, the company's real-time cloud-based supply chain planning platform supporting demand response, supply planning and inventory management oriented features, with supply chain analytics to support decisioning.
Reporting and Spotlight have changed the game for us. Spotlight has brought dynamic reporting to our team and the rest of the office as well. With dynamic planning, we've spent more time doing analysis instead of running and creating the reports. Recently, we've spent less time analyzing and more time formatting, and Spotlight has brought the analysis back to FP&A.
One of the best parts is how it is suited to global or multi-site organizations with complex supply chains. It just operates across multiple regions with various manufacturing facilities, and that too with very much ease; it is simple, solid and very reliable in terms of working when the logistics is an issue and fetches data and insights very quickly.
Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅
The system does not work as smoothly when processing large volumes of data. There are processing delays when we are busy planning.
Moreover, because inventory exceptions are not automatically alerted, employees have to check them manually, which takes extra time. Upgrades in these sections could raise our operational efficiency.
Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.
Because It is is a cloud-based platform that can be accessed from anywhere and also it has a user-friendly which is great for navigation within the software. As it offers a wide range of features including demand forecasting, supply chain planning, and collaboration tools which makes it even more powerful
I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.
Most of the issues in the implementation were self inflicted, the team at Top Down was great and did a good job managing hours and teaching our team how to best handle the system. The implementation went longer than expected as they always do but the GL and erp link was up and running quickly so we could build reporting
Set up a supply chain strategy. Define your north star. Follow it with good consultants. Get know how from consultants with a deep know how in the system. Do proper change management.
Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a dedicated software that is built to report on rather than building from scratch in an excel environment
SAP Integrated Business Planning was easiest to implement versus MS Dynamics and Jira because it allows us to scale on-demand, always having in mind our business requirements and without sacrificing compute resources or increasing costs by adopting operating system licenses. This is the case with MS Dynamics 365. Jira, which was previously used for years, was transforming into a monster because it is difficult, heavy, and hard to use for all organizations. SAP Integrated Business Planning was an excellent choice for countering all the issues with other solutions in the market, although it increased our budget.
From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.
