Enterprise Planning
What is enterprise planning?
Enterprise planning is used by large organizations to unify and align planning across all departments, including finance, HR, sales, marketing, IT, operations. The goal of enterprise planning is to enable planners to see financial performance across the enterprise. Enterprise planning does this by breaking down operational silos and merging financial and operational planning processes together. Enterprise planning solutions funnel departmental data into single source that management can use to support their decisions.
What is the purpose of enterprise planning?
Enterprise planning links finance with operations to facilitate collaboration and drive better business results. Technically speaking, enterprise planning solutions integrate financial and non-financial information in a single system and provide users with a means to communication cross functionally. This improves the flow of information. By unifying planning processes across an organization in an enterprise planning solution, finance has greater visibility into current and future financial outcomes, and how those drivers impact operations.
What does enterprise planning include?
Enterprise planning can include, but isn’t limited to:
- P&L Planning
- Balance Sheet Planning
- Workforce and HR Planning
- Cash Flow Planning
- Capital Planning
- Profitability Analysis
- Integrated Business Planning
- Production Capacity Planning
- Sales and Operational Planning
- Strategic Planning
Why is enterprise planning beneficial?
Enterprise planning aligns finance and operations. Enterprise planning enables planners to see the cause and effect relationship of operational and financial data. This gives planners more visibility into resource requirements to enable optimum business performance.
Enterprise planning improves cross-functional collaboration. When organizations plan by department, plans are typically siloed from one another. By instituting a cohesive planning process across the organization, all departments plan with other departments in mind. This awareness results in operational strategies that consider financial results and more effective performance management.
Enterprise planning sheds light on performance. Many companies limit the planning function by relegating planning tools to finance and finance alone. But by deploying an enterprise planning strategy, organizations have the potential to align their entire business. When all planning functions are connected enterprise-wide, planners from every department can determine goals and create budgets and plans that consider all facets of the organization.
Enterprise planning supports decision making. Enterprise planning systems elevate planner’s analysis by democratizing relevant information across departments. With the ability to sift and sort enterprise data according to various drivers, planners can understand the root cause of performance, which enables them to either take action or change course.