Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that Bates Technical College has achieved significant benefits by moving their manual, spreadsheet-based capital planning processes to Alight’s automated planning package. Bates is located in Tacoma, Washington. The college operates on three campuses, with over 600,000 square feet of classrooms, shops, meeting rooms, and offices. [Read more…]

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that it has joined Oracle’s partnership program at the Gold level. As the leader and industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO was delighted to be selected as an Oracle Gold Partner. Rand, who founded Pillar, the first enterprise planning software package, reflects on some important history to frame this partnership, “In 1994, Hyperion acquired Pillar. With over 2,500 customers purchasing Hyperion Pillar, the deal proved to be one of the great cash cows of the decade. Ironically, though in 2007, Oracle acquired Hyperion and finally killed Pillar which was replaced with Hyperion Planning. Some Pillar users did not make the move to Hyperion Planning including Apple Computer which is still using Pillar at the time of our partnership because Pillar had some beautiful functionality especially around unit rate amounts.” [Read more…]

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that Rand Heer, an industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions and Alight CEO, will keynote multiple rolling forecast trainings and workshops detailing how companies can quadruple the ROI of financial planning and analysis.

“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.” [Read more…]

Alight LLC entered into a partnership with Scope Systems, a global leader of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Reporting solutions to the mining and mining services industries based in Perth, Australia. The partnership between Alight and Scope Systems is designed to provide mining companies with planning and financial reporting systems that complement traditional ERP systems. [Read more…]

Alight LLC and Ralph Harker Associates formed a strategic partnership to deliver a budgeting, reporting and planning solution customized for higher education. Dr. Andrew Harker, president of Ralph Harker Associates and director of Budget Management at Stanford University, worked with Alight to co-develop best-practice planning models. After working with dozens of small and large institutions of learning, Harker and the Alight team identified tuition planning, endowment modeling, and personnel planning as three key areas that were ripe for standardization and best practice solutions. Higher education finance and budget departments can now leverage the hard work that went into standardizing these models to immediately streamline and improve planning processes. [Read more…]