Start Your Continuous Planning Journey with Planful Now

Planful Now was prompted by the struggle FP&A teams were facing in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, where uncertainty was the only known factor and business agility was the only viable reaction. Planful Now offers a solution to your most pressing FP&A challenges by compressing cycle times, impacting every corner of your business, and building connectivity and collaboration into your FP&A processes. And it does it in less than 30 days and with minimal risk.

But even as we are well on our way to opening up large swaths of our communities and economies, that uncertainty, and the resulting need for agile planning hasn’t waned. Which is why Planful Now remains a compelling program aimed at the use cases that are slowing you down, diminishing your agility, or impeding your collaboration with the business.

But don’t look at Planful Now as a single solution to a single area of concern. Planful Now is, in fact, a flexible first step on any organization’s continuous planning journey. You choose where to start and which use case will have the most impact, and then you start using Planful. And this is a true rollout, where, in under 30 days, you’ll actually be using Planful for cash flow forecasting, workforce planning, monthly close and consolidation, or any one of a number of other use cases.

Then, as that first use case is accelerated, modernized, and connected, you move on to the next, and then the next, and repeat. In just a few months, you can expand the benefits of continuous planning to the corners of your organization by aiming it where you need it most. It’s a step-by-step rollout, where you choose the steps.

Here’s how some Planful customers have started their own continuous planning journeys with Planful Now continuous planning tools.

SmartyPants Vitamins

SmartyPants Vitamins went live on Planful in just 20 days, focusing on their highest impact and most critical FP&A use cases first to get a fast ROI and quick buy-in from the business. They chose to tackle Financial Reporting and Sales and Trade Planning first, and quickly had 20 sales managers using Planful continuous planning tools. The FP&A team is also using Planful for rolling monthly forecasts.

“With Planful, we were up and running with our Sales and Trade spend forecast templates in three weeks,” said Cheryl Chow, Senior Finance Manager at SmartyPants Vitamins. “Planful provided amazingly fast time-to-value, enabling the FP&A team to plan their quarterly reforecast following Q1 close, prepare for an upcoming board meeting, and create new forecasts for sales, advertising, and other areas without breaking our stride.”

Temple University

Temple University was live on Planful in just 4 weeks by focusing on Financial Consolidation and Reporting to get the fast time-to-value. They’re already rolling out Structured Planning for FP&A, and will be bringing Planful Dynamic Planning to 20 users outside of Finance. Eventually, the FP&A team plans to push the Planful FP&A platform for continuous planning out to every corner of the university, including a campus in Japan.

Carta

Carta was growing fast, but their reliance on spreadsheets held them back in real time data access. This software company was experiencing delays, errors, and a lack of visibility for FP&A and the business—all because of spreadsheets. So they rolled out Planful tools for continuous planning in just 6 weeks, and it quickly cut more than a day’s worth of work from their weekly financial reporting process. Now, as they recover from the COVID-19 crisis, they’re rolling out Planful Workforce Planning and Sales Planning to teams outside of Finance.

“It became clear Planful could get us high time-to-value as fast as possible,” said Kevin Zell, Head of Strategic Finance at Carta. “We were able to start building reports and have them in Planful very quickly. That alone took about 10 hours out of our process.”

Bose Corporation

In a timely example, Bose Corporation was already using Planful for Workforce Planning to automate and optimize headcount. But in the wake of the COVID-19 closures of their retail operations, they’re now using Planful continuous planning tools to develop their reopening plans. Planful’s fast what-if scenario planning and monthly forecasting are also proving critical as the company plans for reopening. And, their continuous planning journey goes on as they’re already preparing to use Planful for supply and demand planning.

“Being able to re-forecast quickly and efficiently in the next 12 months is going to be hugely helpful for us as we pivot and redirect the ship with COVID-19,” said Luis Martinez Luna, Sr. Financial & Business Analyst, Corporate FP&A at Bose Corporation.

Start Your Continuous Planning Journey Now

If you haven’t seen the video overview delivered by our SVP Marketing, Rowan Tonkin, you can stream it here. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

Planful Now is more than just an offer; it’s a delivery model that serves as the first step on your continuous planning journey, where you get to choose the most impactful area to start, and then decide how you expand the value from there. It won’t disrupt FP&A or your business, and you’ll be hands-on with Planful in less than a month. That’s an extremely fast time-to-value with an equally impressive ROI.

With continued uncertainty in our future, now’s not the time to wait. Now’s the time to put the right tools for continuous planning in place so you are ready for the next market shock. Planful Now continuous planning by accelerating lets you compress FP&A cycle times, push the value out to every corner of the agile business, and build a more connected and collaborative organization.

Planful Now comes with very little risk yet delivers plenty of upside, so why not get started today?