Perform 2022 Closes Out With a Bevy of Customers, Partners, and Product Reveals

Planful Perform 2022 has come to a close, but the final day was still jammed full of exciting customer stories, deep dives from Planful partners, a raft of sessions covering new and existing Planful products, and much more for the hundreds of finance and accounting professionals in attendance. We saw over 20 sessions today, plus several networking events and countless impromptu conversations around ARIA Resort. Based on early feedback from attendees, Perform 2022 was a resounding success!

Here’s just a glimpse of what happened today at Planful Perform 2022.

We kicked off this final day with the Planful Product Keynote, delivered by our team of product leaders. They revealed new innovations to help accounting, FP&A, and finance teams take action. These included the release of Planful Predict: Projections, the latest addition to our Planful Predict suite of AI and ML applications, and the launch of our business user experience, a major step forward in the preparation of accurate, actionable forecasts and budgets.

These product innovations give finance and accounting professionals, and the broader business, groundbreaking new ways to improve the speed, accuracy, and interconnectedness of their budgets and forecasts.

Learn more here.

Following these announcements, two of our Planful product experts, Justin Merritt, Senior Director, Solutions Consulting, and Bikramaditya Singhal, Principal Product Manager, demonstrated the native predictive intelligence behind Planful Predict and how it helps finance and accounting make confident, intelligent, human-led decisions with greater agility and accuracy. That session was followed by Planful’s Andrew Von Eschen, Principal Solutions Consultant, and Dan Mier, Head of Product Marketing, as they demonstrated how Planful helps Finance and Accounting sharpen planning practices, increase planning cycle frequency, and make the move to rolling forecasts. Finally, Ron Wicklander, Solutions Architect at Planful, explained how Planful’s capabilities work together across advanced use cases to help optimize cash flow positions.

It’s always great to read customer case studies, but it’s even more powerful to hear directly from these finance and accounting professionals as they share the challenges they overcame and the success they’ve found using the Planful Platform. Planful Perform 2022 featured plenty of customer-led sessions, including:

• Brian Skelly, Director of Finance, explained how Manhattan Associates, a technology leader in supply chain and omnichannel commerce, leveraged asymmetrical problem solving with Planful to answer the call from leaders for better planning and reporting capabilities.
• Michael Zambetti, Manager, Finance & Data Analytics at National DCP, a foodservice supply chain solution provider, shared how the company cuts through the clutter of data to build bespoke financial reports tailored to different use cases and audiences.
• Jon Kortebein, Senior Financial Analyst at YMCA of the North, which runs local Ys and camps across Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, detailed how the organization uses Planful to reduce uncertainty in its planning process across multiple business units, variables, and scenarios.
• Grant Brooks, Finance Director at FIGS showed attendees how this direct-to-consumer apparel and lifestyle brand for healthcare professionals reduced operational friction by deconstructing processes, identifying the key steps and inputs, and giving individuals more ownership over those inputs.
• Michael Tremor, Senior Analyst, Corporate Applications at Vistra, an integrated retail electricity and power generation company, explained how his team uses the breadth of the Planful Platform to plan capital expenditures at a corporate and operational level.
• Chris Tracy, Global Director of FP&A at Vantage Specialty Chemicals, a global natural chemistry company, covered techniques the company uses to deal with supply chain uncertainty and spiking raw materials costs by leveraging Planful to quickly model, forecast, and update costs.
• Jane Watkins, VP Finance at CloudSense, a configure, price, and quote (CPQ) platform provider, explained how the company evaluated workforce planning solutions, selected Workforce Planning for Planful to replace its spreadsheet-driven processes, and developed its first workforce plan.
• Lauren Bissell, Continuous Improvement Manager – FP&A at Golden State Foods, explained how this diversified supplier to the foodservice industry used Planful to budget and forecast down to the SKU level.

Planful Perform 2022 featured plenty of visionary speakers covering top finance and accounting industry trends and macroeconomic topics. We already saw Barbara Corcoran, entrepreneur, investor, and star of ABC’s award-winning “Shark Tank”, and a keynote from Grant Halloran, Planful’s CEO. Today brought out even more experts offering their takes on how finance and accounting can navigate the uncertainties of 2022 and beyond.

• Glenn Snyder, FP&A and corporate strategy executive, presented a new approach to FP&A planning and provided examples of 3-year strategy decks which outline a team’s status, a long-term outlook, and a roadmap for how to get there.
• Chris Ortega, Chief Executive Officer at Fresh FP&A, a finance and accounting consulting firm, dug into how finance can bridge people and performance strategies, apply people scorecards, and understand the balance between people and efficiency. Chris also led a session explaining how you can build a comprehensive framework to introduce, implement, and integrate empathy without losing your data-driven approach.
  Noted author and FP&A visionary Steve Player, Managing Director at Future Ready Finance, shared lessons learned from leading-edge FP&A implementations.
• Erik Nakamura, Chief Financial Officer at Orange Comet, delved into the role CFOs can play as their team’s cultural leader and shares the key elements every organization needs to create a robust culture.

We were delighted to have so many new and returning sponsors for Planful Perform 2022, including the return of Trintech as our exclusive platinum sponsor. But many of these sponsors also led sessions at Perform 2022, too.

• A joint team of Trintech and Planful experts discussed how Finance and Accounting can overcome manual, disconnected processes for increased visibility with automation in financial close, financial reporting, and F&A processes. The team followed that session with an interactive demo demonstrating how Adra by Trintech seamlessly integrates into Planful to deliver complete control and visibility from close to consolidate to report and plan.
• Bakerfield Solutions showed how finance and accounting teams can quickly move dynamic planning from static, offline spreadsheets into Planful to harness the power of centralized data for increased planning accuracy and customization.
• Embark explained how CFOs can turn FP&A people, processes, and technologies into an invaluable resource for decision-makers across the business.
• KeenVision explored using the intersection of people and planning to make thoughtful and accurate analysis even more critical to financial success, especially when leveraging the integration of Planful and Microsoft Power BI.
• Techcloudpro explained how businesses are using automation and AI to streamline, simplify, and optimize business processes for improved efficiency and productivity. They also shared avoidable pitfalls when implementing automation.

Phew! Planful Perform 2022 was packed with value, insights, connections, announcements, celebrations, awards, stories, and so much more! We can’t wait for you to see what’s in store for Planful over the rest of the year and into the future. And, stay tuned for details about Planful Perform 2023!

Thank you to all of the customers who attended and presented, our long list of generous sponsors and integral partners, and, especially, YOU for showing up virtually or in person. You, our community of finance and accounting professionals, are why we put so much effort into Planful Perform each year and we thank you for your continued engagement in and excitement for this event. We do it for you and we couldn’t do it without you!