“This industry needs an ROI calculator, something tangible that finance teams can use to measure the effectiveness of their planning systems,” said Rand Heer, Alight Planning’s CEO. “I outline a framework for getting a handle on the ROI in my article How Agile is your Planning which was featured in a recent issue of Strategic Finance Magazine.”

According to an audience of 100 finance professionals who attended Heer’s webinar “Measuring the ROI of Planning Software,” earlier this year, 73% of those purchasing planning software responded “Unsure” when asked about ROI.

Alight Planning’s ROI Calculator is aimed at helping organizations prioritize initiatives to improve planning. The calculator measures cost reductions associated with streamlining existing processes and the value of introducing advanced planning processes such as rolling forecasts, driver-based planning, and scenario analysis on-the-fly.

While saving time can contribute to ROI, companies reporting major ROI with Alight Planning implement planning protocols they would not attempt in spreadsheets. For example, Gary Kinman, Vice President of Finance and Analytics at SoftLayer, a cloud computing and storage provider, noted, “We now have the balance sheet and cash flow statements integrated right into our financial model, something we wouldn’t even try in our legacy planning process. When we make a change to revenues or expenses, the impact immediately flows through to the balance sheet and cash as well as an updated P&L.”

About Alight Planning
Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and intuitive interfaces provide enable finance teams to rapidly build any driver-based planning model, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Rapidly deployed and IT-independent, Alight Planning has been embraced by organizations of all sizes. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.

“Out of the box reporting solutions, no matter how good, are inherently flawed because they attempt to standardize an activity that should be unique to each user. Some reports and analyses can only be delivered through a custom reporting solution; the Advanced Reporting Add-In provides PlanGuru users with total discretion over their reports.”
- Taylor Wielage, Director of Application Development, PlanGuru

With this Excel based tool, users can build and run reports off an unlimited number of PlanGuru analyses simultaneously. Consolidating schedules, multiple scenario analysis and compiled results can be created within a single report. Users can save time by building report books that assemble multiple sets of forward looking financial results in one Excel file. Reports can also be built with dynamic instructions to increase the flexibility and efficiency of the report stock.

To learn more about this tool, or sign up for a live demo, visit PlanGuru’s Advanced Reporting Add-in webpage. PlanGuru also offers a Free 30 Day Trial of it’s core budgeting and forecasting software.

PlanGuru was first launched in 1998 with the idea that businesses around the world would benefit from an affordable budgeting and forecasting solution. The PlanGuru application has helped thousands of financial professionals, businesses, and non profits improve their budgeting and forecasting by balancing the correct amount of flexibility and structure.

Through a flexible spreadsheet like interface with an integrated set of financial statements, users get started quickly and don’t incur costly implementations. PlanGuru improves forecast accuracy by delivering over 20 forecasting methods, while also allowing the ability to create unique projection methods.

“Midway through my presentation,” said Lamorte, “I asked the group of about 50 attendees whether their management is prioritizing ‘streamlining existing processes to save time’, Type 1 benefits, or ‘introducing new processes that add business value’, Type 2 benefits. Earlier in the conference I spoke with one FP&A professional who reported, ‘We’re working on the hard benefits which can be measured by time saved; we’re also interested in soft benefits that cannot be measured such as improving decision making.’ This inspired me to conduct an informal survey of the audience about what type of benefits are most important to management. The surprising part was that every single attendee reported management prioritizes Type 2 over Type 1.”

Robert Kugel, SVP and Research Director with Ventana Research spoke at the same GMI event prior to Lamorte, “Realistically, you shouldn’t read too much into a single survey based on a live audience of finance professionals who were there to learn about innovation in planning. However, it doesn’t surprise me that everyone put business value ahead of simply doing what they do faster. These are companies that want their planning and budgeting process to add value and promote success, rather than just going through the motions.“

During the presentation Lamorte provided examples to sharpen the Type 1 and Type 2 distinction, “A management team is expressing Type 1 – streamline existing processes – as more critical than Type 2 – introduce new processes that add business value – when they prioritize reducing time spent verifying formulas every month to update a current forecast over introducing a new planning process. Examples of new processes might include introducing a rolling forecast, making the move to driver-based planning, or integrating isolated balance sheet and cash flow models into the planning model.”

As part of its ongoing commitment to understanding how best to improve financial planning and enable finance teams to make real impacts that drive their business forward, the Alight team hopes to extend this survey to a larger audience later in 2012.

About Alight Planning

Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pennsylvania State University, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.

Customer Growth

In 2011, Alight Planning’s revenue grew over 30% compared to 2010. In cases where objectives included Agile Planning™ and rolling forecasts in addition to streamlining the budgeting process, the company’s win rate was nearly 80%, helping Alight Planning increase its customer base to over 250 organizations. Companies from virtually all industries selected Alight Planning and reported especially high ROI in cases where driver-based planning and what-if analysis were critical requirements. Notable new customers included PerkinElmer, Transgenomic, Health Net Federal Services, Larkin Hospital, Bumrungrad Hospital, Northeastern University, University of the Pacific, The New School, Sundance Resources Limited, Lynas Corporation, Polaris Metals, Capriccio Software, Bionostics, YMCA of Simcoe-Muskoka, and AAA Northern California, Nevada and Utah.

Management Team Expansion and Partner Development

The company announced that Jeff Walker, former Oracle CFO and founder of Oracle Applications, joined the Alight Planning board of directors. Building off the most successful year for Alight Planning partners, Aidan Mitchell was promoted to the management team as Vice President, Partner Development. After a series of successes with mining companies, Alight Planning formalized a strategic partnership with Scope Systems, a global leader of ERP to the mining and mining services industries.

“During a workshop with a partner, one of our joint customers reported that the Alight Planning solution added $1M in value by enabling better strategic decision making,” said Mitchell, “These types of value statements reflect the enormous potential for partners looking to expand their offering with a world-class planning solution. Alight Planning is uniquely positioned to help our partners create and develop their financial planning solutions and practices. I am looking forward to expanding the partner programs while ensuring every one of our partners gets everything they need along the marketing, sales, and product support continuum.”

Thought Leadership

After reflecting on why Alight Planning customers consistently report major success, Rand Heer, Chief Architect and CEO, introduced and won the trademark for Agile Planning™, a best practice methodology that maximizes business value of planning activities. Heer was selected to speak on The Planning Maturity Curve and Agile Planning at venues across the globe including New York, Boston, Washington DC, San Diego, London, and Amsterdam.

Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pennsylvania State University, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.

“I am delighted with our initial exposure through Proformative in 2011,” said Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO. “It’s great to see a free resource for finance executives become so valuable so quickly. When I worked with the original Pillar team that created the first enterprise planning solution to replace spreadsheets, I knew we were at the forefront of innovation. When I was working in the trenches as a finance professional, I saw a huge hole and created Pillar to fill it. While online communities are popping up everywhere these days, John Kogan and his team have strong roots in finance, and it appears Proformative is filling a hole as well.”

Alight will provide Proformative members with dozens of free resources including the latest analysis on The Planning Maturity Curve and Agile Planning, a methodology that maximizes business value while significantly reducing the level of management effort devoted to planning activities. The partnership enables Alight to sponsor its first Proformative webinar. Best of all, Proformative members will be eligible for special offers including VIP passes to Alight-sponsored budgeting and forecasting events in 2012.

“As a former CFO myself, I am pleased to be partnering with the team that started the budgeting and planning software movement back in the days of Pillar,” said John Kogan, CEO of Proformative. “Proformative members are sure to benefit from the free content and resources provided by Rand Heer and the Alight team. I am confident that this is the beginning of many benefits this partnership will bring our membership as they continue to seek out innovative tools and technologies that improve their companies’ decision making.”

“The whole philosophy at Proformative resonates with finance professionals who are deploying Alight to enable better planning and move off spreadsheets,” notes Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing at Alight. “For example, our customers and prospects recognize that testimonials and video clips hosted on software vendor websites are highly edited and likely biased. Traditionally, our customers and prospects seek out third party reviews on sites like Capterra. We expect to see more finance professionals share their experiences with Alight and other solutions in 2012 using Proformative’s reviews program. Proformative may become the best platform for finance professionals to share both the strengths and weaknesses of solutions they’ve implemented.”

In addition to Proformative, Alight’s thought leadership content on the Planning Maturity Curve and Agile Planning has been featured in: Marcus Evans CFO Summits, IE Group, American Strategic Management Institute (ASMI), American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).

“I had my capital planning model up and running in Alight within weeks,” said Marty Mattes, Director of Facilities & Operations at Bates. “We now have access to both planning and budget tracking. I can’t imagine the effort, processes, and ongoing maintenance that would have been involved using spreadsheets to achieve similar outcomes – if we even could have. We are now using Alight to make better budget management decisions.”

Bates needed a flexible planning solution that could look out six years, track both actuals and budget data, and enable multiple scenarios to reside in a single, integrated planning environment. Prior to Alight, Bates used the state’s processing paperwork, which was adequate for tracking the budget, but not for management. Alight is a management solution that enables Bates to quickly forecast multiple scenarios and make more informed decisions around capital planning.

“We wanted to run what-if analyses that would enable us to refine projections over the next 3-6 months as well as the next 4 years,” added Mattes. “Tagging line items to capital projects with Alight’s dimension functionality makes it easy for us to instantly filter the model and quickly view a single project across campuses. In addition to using Alight for capital planning, we recently completed a model for utilities-budget planning and management. We are now in the process of expanding Alight for budgeting processes such as maintenance and operations, custodial budgets, facilities administration, and parking.”

Since Alight is easy to deploy, Bates benefited from a rapid implementation that added value right from the start. In addition to saving time and reducing the errors inherent in traditional spreadsheet-based planning, Alight’s Unit/Rate/Amount structure and modeling interfaces enable Agile Planning™ characterized by the ability to perform on-the-fly scenario analysis.

“We are pleased to see another successful migration off spreadsheets for planning in Higher Education,” says Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing with Alight. “Historically, Higher Education finance teams were content streamlining existing budgets and reports. However, in today’s cost-cutting environment, saving time is not enough. Schools like Bates are looking for agile planning tools to help them make better decisions faster.”

In addition to Bates Technical College, schools of all sizes have deployed Alight for Higher Education including: Indiana Wesleyan University, Tuft’s Medical Center, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Penn State University, University of California Education Abroad Program, The New School, and University of the Pacific.

For more than 70 years, Bates has provided the community with industry-relevant technical education. Today, Bates offers 53 programs in a wide range of career disciplines, and serves approximately 3,000 career training students and 10,000 more community members in programs such as Continuing Education, Home & Family Life, High School, Business & Management Training Center, and others. Our mission to inspire, challenge, and educate is at the core of each program we offer, and everything we do.

Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build sophisticated driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as mid-market companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.

“The implementation process was very smooth and the professional services team was incredibly helpful,” said John Kearns, Corporate Controller, IntegraMed.  “We were able to go live in just six weeks, which has allowed us to use the application more than we anticipated. Our Adaptive Planning solution has over 200 plans, is just as flexible as Excel, and offers far better control over the process.”

“Adaptive Planning has far exceeded our expectations,” said Kearns.  “By rolling out Adaptive Planning to 50 users, the finance team and operational managers have benefited from easier access to financial information, improved data analysis, and better alignment and accountability across the company.  With the benefit of hindsight, I see now that Adaptive Planning is not simply an alternative to Excel-based budgeting, but is in an entirely different league.”

“We are pleased that we have been able to help IntegraMed move beyond Excel and transform their budgeting and forecasting,” said Greg Schneider, VP Marketing, Adaptive Planning.  “They provide an excellent example of how Adaptive Planning can help companies of all sizes, in virtually any industry, create tremendous value through automated corporate performance management.”

The five top BI resolutions at a glance:

Resolution 1: BI Use Cases – Data Quality meets Quantity
On many companies’ wish lists is BI for the masses – the many potential users in an organization that currently do not have access to the information they need to make fact-based decisions. Countless businesses are using BI systems that only extend to a small group of power-users, when in practice, everyone from the C-level down is making decisions that affect company performance on a daily basis. Determining how far down to roll out your BI solution should be high on the list of resolutions to ensure that your company gets the maximum benefit from its BI systems.

Resolution 2: Collaboration Tools – the Key to Success
Companies often have to fight their way through reams of reports of very different quality. At the same time, there is usually no verified information on whether the reports are up to date, used frequently, or viewed as “quality” by users. Collaborative BI solutions allow users to search for information, comment on it, ask for enhancements, and share it with co-workers. And IT staff appreciate the statistics these solutions generate about report usage. Collaboration when it comes to BI is about adding value to existing information and using it to the company’s advantage.

Resolution 3: Form Follows Function
Unfortunately, many businesses still frequently make the mistake of deploying reporting systems based solely on technical requirements. A user interface is then popped over the application and users are left to cope with an often unfriendly frontend, making self-service difficult. To make BI more convenient for users, one resolution for 2012 should be: attach more value to the frontend, which is what most BI users see, keeping true to the maxim “form follows function.” The best way of doing this is to ask BI users directly what information they need and how they would like it presented. The adoption rate of your BI system is sure to rise once the frontend is considered as important as the backend.

Resolution 4: Mobilize BI
As the mobile workforce grows, BI solutions for smartphones and tablets are becoming more important. While some companies dive right in and deploy mobile BI without a clear strategy, we recommend that they take some time to think about which user groups will benefit from mobile BI access, how to present existing reports and dashboards in a compact and easily digestible format for mobile devices, and how to keep the data safe from third parties while users are on the go.

Resolution 5: Tame Data Streams
The need for information often arises with little notice and has to be delivered quickly. Unfortunately, many BI systems were not originally designed to operate at the speed of business today. Users will no longer accept performance issues, slow information delivery, or an irritating proliferation of quick fixes. Companies should make a resolution to develop a long-term BI concept that involves the reduction of unstructured data – for example, by employing enterprise data warehouses.

“IT-supported process optimization remains one of the most important goals in the business environment, next to cost reductions,” explained Achim Röhe, VP Professional Services at arcplan. “All companies want to utilize their existing systems better, and these five recommendations are a good place to start realizing enormous improvements from investments they have already made. If companies follow our BI resolutions, they will improve their BI by leaps and bounds in 2012.”

Jeffrey Walker who built Oracle’s applications business and was also CFO at Oracle was pleased to learn of the partnership, “Looking back on it, it’s too bad we at Oracle didn’t pick up on Pillar and Rand’s vision before Hyperion. You can see the Pillar foundations for enterprise planning today in offerings from Oracle, IBM, and SAP. With Alight, Rand advances his vision to new heights and makes his planning tools accessible to companies of all sizes—not just big players with deep pockets. I expect the partnership with Oracle will lead to big things for both parties.”

The news of the partnership is quite exciting to finance and IT teams who are already working with both Alight and Oracle. Mark Brinkerhoff, VP Finance with Ultradent, is eager to reap the benefits of this new relationship, “Before Alight was selected as an Oracle Gold Partner, I have been able to get our financial data out of Oracle Financials and into Alight. We have a complex chart of accounts so we leverage Alight’s logfiles feature which gives us complete visibility if something slips during an import. While data integration from Oracle to our spreadsheet model often took several days, we can get our Oracle data integrated into Alight in about one business day. With Oracle Gold Partner status, Alight’s import process with Oracle Financials is on track to get even better in 2012.”

In addition to Ultradent, dozens of companies who use both the Alight Planning solution and Oracle/Hyperion applications should benefit from this new partnership including mid-sized companies such as Atronix and larger organizations such as Siemens PLM Software.

Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle’s partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle’s growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visit http://www.oracle.com/partners.

About Alight LLC
Alight LLC’s Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pennsylvania State University, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.

“I am pleased by the positive reception of the Planning Maturity Curve that we introduced earlier in 2011. The market is seeing a massive shift from software solutions designed only to streamline the annual budget and save time with automated reports to a sharp focus on continuous planning and rolling forecasts. The Planning Maturity Curve helps you measure the ROI of planning activities and in almost all cases, we conclude that the action and excitement right now is in agile planning which is characterized by driver-based planning, integrated actuals, and scenario analysis,” Heer said. “The presentation takes the materials I developed last year to the next level and retains its educational focus on the core processes required to make planning a value-add activity. Most importantly, we’re seeing that by leveraging driver-based planning and integrating actuals at the right level of detail into the financial plan, it can be easy to implement agile planning and introduce best practices such as a rolling forecast.”

Earlier in 2011, CFO Magazine invited Rand to lead a workshop on the Planning Maturity Curve as part of CPMT3 Tactics…Tools…Technology slated for January 31st 1:00 – 4:30pm at the Grand Hyatt New York. It will be the first opportunity to see Rand present in 2012 and is also the debut Planning Maturity Curve presentation at a CFO Magazine event. The material resonates with companies of all sizes and is gaining traction with larger organizations including Siemens and PerkinElmer. Rand will also keynote ASMI Rolling Forecast Trainings in San Diego and Washington DC. In addition, Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing & Sales, will speak at ASMI events in Dallas and Boston.

Earlier this month, Mr. Lamorte was selected as an ASMI Senior Fellow. “I am always grateful for an honor and thank the ASMI for the recognition; however, it is the quality of the finance professionals who attend the ASMI events that make the interactive presentations so valuable. Building off another successful ASMI event in San Diego earlier this spring, Alight is pleased to be the lead sponsor for budgeting and forecasting events in 2012,” says Lamorte, who first presented at ASMI with Larry Van Kuran of Kaiser Permanente on the topic of driver-based planning back in 2008. Lamorte will employ current forecasting theory and best practices to reflect on how organizations can quickly move across the Planning Maturity Curve and quadruple the ROI of Financial Planning and Analysis. “ASMI is pleased to partner with Alight Planning for our cornerstone Budgeting and Forecasting Summits and Rolling Forecast trainings” remarks Maria Cvitkovic, Director of Education with ASMI, “Ben and Rand both bring tremendous value to our audience, and their Planning Maturity Curve takes scenario analysis and agile planning to the crucial next level.”

For more information about the American Strategic Management Institute (ASMI), visit http://www.ASMIweb.com.

For more information about CFO and upcoming events, visit http://www.cfo.com/conferences.

In this challenging economic landscape, organizations must develop and execute innovative strategies to survive and thrive. Performance and process improvement methodologies give managers the tools they need to run leaner, more efficient businesses. The mission of the American Strategic Management Institute (ASMI) is to connect business leaders with best-in-class practices and training to address management challenges and improve results. ASMI has grown into one of the nation’s most innovative training providers, combining market research and industry insight to deliver experiences and tools to inspire leaders and grow businesses. Through virtual sessions, national summits, training programs and consulting services, ASMI brings together leaders to share insights, ideas and actions to transform organizations.