Back to BlogsOne of the most common challenges finance teams face when implementing a new EPM platform isn’t the technology itself. It’s knowing where to start. What does a best-in-class bookings waterfall model look like? How have other retail organizations approached same-store sales planning? What drivers are other sales teams using in their revenue models?
The Planful Solution Exchange exists to answer exactly these kinds of questions.
What is the Solution Exchange?
The Solution Exchange is a community resource where Planful customers, partners, and staff can discover, share, and deploy planning and modeling solutions to specific business problems.
It’s an interactive forum of ideas, industry best practices, and proven solutions contributed by experts across the Planful ecosystem. Whether you’re looking for a head start on a new modeling project or simply want to see how other organizations have approached a similar challenge, the Solution Exchange gives you direct access to real-world solutions built by people who have already solved the problem you’re working on.
What counts as a solution?
Solutions in the Solution Exchange are example models built using Planful Modeling. They’re designed to serve two purposes:
- Head starts. Use a solution as a foundation for your own model rather than building from scratch. Adapt it to your organization’s specific drivers, assumptions, and business rules.
- Learning tools. Study how other organizations have approached a given modeling challenge. Understand which drivers they’ve used, how those drivers interact, and how they’ve structured the model to reflect their business.
It’s worth being clear about what solutions are not. They’re not finished applications. They’re not supported or maintained by Planful. Think of them the way you’d think of a model shared by a trusted peer at another company: immensely valuable as a learning resource and a starting point, but something you’d adapt and make your own rather than deploy unchanged.
As the Solution Exchange evolves, it will expand beyond modeling solutions to include planning templates, reports, and other artifacts that help finance teams work more efficiently.
What kinds of solutions are available?
The Solution Exchange includes dozens of enterprise planning solutions spanning a wide range of industries and functional areas. Examples include:
- Retail: Same-store sales planning and reporting models
- Life sciences: Supply chain management and profitability analysis solutions
- Sales: Driver-based revenue planning models by customer and product, bookings and revenue waterfall models
- Marketing: Lead generation and pipeline models
One of the more valuable aspects of the Solution Exchange is discovering creative connections between solutions across industries. For example, the concept of same-store sales modeling in retail shares significant structural similarities with ramped-rep productivity modeling in enterprise sales. Solutions that look industry-specific often contain ideas and approaches that transfer well to entirely different contexts.
Who can contribute solutions?
Any Planful customer, partner, or staff member can submit a solution to the Solution Exchange. The Planful community includes a wide range of experts across industries and functional areas, and the Solution Exchange is designed to capture and share that expertise broadly.
More participation means more value for everyone. Whether you’re a consultant looking to demonstrate your expertise, a partner wanting to reach new customers, or a customer who has built something you’re proud of and want to share, the Solution Exchange is the place to do it.
How are solutions verified?
All solutions submitted to the Solution Exchange are reviewed and approved by the Planful Product Management team before being made available to the community. The review process validates two things:
- That the solution addresses a use case relevant to the broader Planful community
- That the solution conforms to Planful Modeling best practices
This ensures that the solutions available in the Exchange are genuinely useful and technically sound, not just a repository of whatever anyone happens to submit.
What are the benefits for customers?
The Solution Exchange gives Planful customers a meaningful advantage when it comes to getting value from their EPM investment. Specifically, it provides:
- The ability to accelerate EPM projects by starting from proven, community-built solutions rather than a blank page
- Visibility into how organizations in the same and adjacent industries have solved similar business problems
- The opportunity to learn how peers have automated solutions to manual, time-consuming planning activities
- A way to contribute back to the community, whether to build your professional brand, demonstrate your firm’s expertise, or simply share something that took you time to figure out so others don’t have to
What are the benefits for Planful partners?
For consulting and implementation partners, the Solution Exchange is an opportunity to demonstrate depth of industry expertise at scale. By contributing proven solutions that address specific, pragmatic business challenges, partners can reach new customers who share the same problems and reinforce their brand within the Planful ecosystem.
It’s a form of thought leadership that’s grounded in actual work rather than marketing claims, which tends to resonate far more effectively with the finance leaders who are evaluating partners for their next EPM project.
Get started with the Solution Exchange
If you’re a Planful customer, the Solution Exchange is available directly within the Planful platform. Browse available solutions, filter by industry or use case, and start exploring what the community has built.
If you have a solution you’d like to contribute, reach out to your Planful account manager to start the submission process.
Not yet a Planful customer? See the platform in action and learn how Planful can help your finance team plan, consolidate, and report with confidence.
