Leave Spreadsheet, Switch to the Connected Planning Platform

 Edsen's friend, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently published an article explaining interesting opportunities in corporate financial planning. With direct insights gathered from heads of finance from various industries, this article reviews some of the reasons why CFO directs their teams to abandon spreadsheets for the sake of cloud-based planning platforms.

In this article entitled "Head of Finance: Stop Using Excel", the heads of finance explain some of the shortcomings of using spreadsheets such as the laborious manual process of making a financial report. They seem to realize that in the world of business acceleration, planning and decision making must be connected in the financial and business operations they support.

Mark Garrett, chief financial officer at the Adobe software company, Inc., explained that the shortage of spreadsheets caused his team to struggle to track which jobs had been filled. He explained, the process could take days and requires his financial team to extract data from different systems.

"I don't want people who plan their finances to spend their time importing and exporting and manipulating data," he told WSJ. "I want them to focus on what the data says to us."

The use of spreadsheets has recently become an obstacle for the company's business processes. In addition to slowing down business processes, the use of spreadsheets is also error-prone, rigid and without connectivity. This of course makes the data processing process takes a long time even for months.

Later, the heads of finance began to switch to using a cloud based planning platform that has many advantages such as increased collaboration and better data transparency that can increase the productivity of their business.

They illustrate the financial, strategic and operational benefits that they get with the planning platform. These benefits include better control over company data, increased collaboration and productivity, reducing errors, speeding up business processes, simplifying data management, and being able to be more proactive and agile.

In fact, even greater benefits await because companies use planning platforms to link plans - both in the financial function, and throughout the business for sales, supply chain, and several other functions.

Companies that link their plans can work through the planning process faster, plan and correct courses more often, and achieve higher visibility throughout their business.

Connected planning technologies such as Anaplan can help achieve transformation by first linking the planning process in the finance department before finally connecting plans throughout the company.

Its flexible modeling platform can connect various processes with business drivers related to demand plans, and align corporate objectives with financial plans and operational tactics.

The financial team that has implemented Anaplan in his company can continue to analyze business performance, making real-time adjustments to forecasts and plans amidst fluctuating market conditions such as when the pandemic corona is like now. In addition, the team can directly communicate any impact of the change to the entire business.
​
Edsen Consulting as a consulting company has an Anaplan planning platform as one of the services that can give your company the strength and flexibility to plan your business area, enabling collaborative decision making to drive increased business performance throughout the company.

To further introduce the solutions provided by Anaplan to companies, Edsen Consulting plans to hold Anaplan Webinar with the theme Spreadsheet Killer in June. If you are interested in joining, please register yourself at Meli Yunita via email meli.yunita@ed-sen.com.

Keep up with Anaplan's Webinar information through our social media and website.

---