Mate Kiss, Data & AI Technical Sales Leader at IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa and Francois Kritzinger, Business Consultant at Venn Cubed.
IBM Planning Analytics helps organisations of all sizes streamline planning, budgeting, forecasting and what-if analysis, addressing key challenges across finance, sales, supply chain and workforce operations.
This is according to Venn Cubed and IBM, which were speaking during a webinar on transforming finance offices this week.
A poll of webinar participants found that 55% still use Excel as their primary planning and budgeting solution; however, Mate Kiss, Data & AI Technical Sales Leader at IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa, noted that there are several pain points associated with traditional spreadsheets.
These include time-consuming manual processes that are error-prone, siloed financial data, a lack of a unified view of financial data and no tools to analyse the impact of costs, with a resulting disconnected financial strategy, inaccuracy of data and forecasts and an inability to rapidly adapt to changes.
“Everyone loves Excel, but we have to understand its disadvantages. It is really easy to make big mistakes – for example, JP Morgan Chase copy-pasted a table and forgot to adjust the calculation in a certain cross-tab, which impacted the bank’s risk exposure and resulted in a $6 billion trading loss,” he said.
“In IBM Planning Analytics, we have overcome these challenges. It is integrated, intuitive, co-operative and AI-powered. Consolidation of the data is fully automated, and you can track, analyse and communicate financial performance in a native spreadsheet and web experience,” Kiss said.
The IBM Planning Analytics architecture includes the central in-memory database with two main interfaces – IBM Planning Analytics for Excel and Planning Analytics for Workspace. So you can continue to use your current Excel software but leverage all the capabilities of IBM Planning Analytics. The Web interface allows you to design the models and visualise the information.
Offering powerful out-of-the-box capabilities and built-in reporting, IBM Planning Analytics delivers fast performance for real-time decision-making, with an easy-to-use web interface, self-service exploratory analytics, highly visual analysis and reporting, and powerful modelling.
“We have made sure that planning can be designed and owned by the business,” he said. “Each and every cell can be secured and managed independently if necessary.”
“Mostly we don’t provide pre-built models, but in our experience, every organisation has different requirements, so IBM Planning Analytics can be used as a framework to design the solution to fit into your processes, and has all the capabilities to support the use cases you have.”
These use cases could include improving the accuracy and reliability of financial reports and forecasts, improving supply chain planning, delivering comprehensive sales analytics and forecasts, developing dynamic workforce blueprints, determining the right marketing mix for optimal ROI, planning and tracking IT projects to determine ROI, or driving sustainability with emissions reduction plans.
IBM Planning Analytics’ built-in AI Assistant helps boost productivity across the enterprise, with AI forecasting, outlier analysis, chart insights and impact analysis, as well as offering natural language summaries.
Francois Kritzinger, Business Consultant at Venn Cubed, a specialist consultancy firm dedicated to implementing cutting-edge enterprise performance management solutions, noted: “IBM Planning Analytics isn’t just for enterprises – it will add value for the small to mid-market across various industries. Some clients have turned around their planning processes from a few weeks to a few hours using IBM Planning Analytics.”
IBM Planning Analytics is available as a SaaS solution or can be deployed on-premises or in a private cloud.
To book a meeting: sales@venncubed.co.za
