Planful

Summer20 Speeds Continuous Planning for Every Corner of the Business

We believe that FP&A is the strategic core of every modern business. When they work faster and more efficiently, they have more time to raise the financial IQ in every corner of the business.  Helping FP&A connect and collaborate with the business is one of the many powerful and transformational benefits of Continuous Planning. Now, with our new Summer20 product release, customers get the power of exciting enhancements that make collaboration across the business faster, easier, and more impactful than ever. 

Summer20, which is now available to Planful customers, continues to build upon the capabilities of our industry-first Dynamic Collaboration, which we rolled out in our Spring20 release. It also brings a totally redesigned workforce planning experience and adds improvements to our platform speed and performance. And, we’ve improved access to the Support Portal, added dozens of new customizations, and made enhancements to improve overall usability. Let’s unpack each of these areas. 

All-new Workforce Planning Experience

Current uncertainties have made workforce planning a challenge at many companies. With our goal of getting FP&A more connected and collaborative with every corner of the business, we’ve put extra effort into easing your workforce planning efforts in this latest release. We’re innovating on these and other types of cross-organizational capabilities to provide a platform for your Continuous Planning journey. 

You’ll first notice an enhanced, more intuitive user experience for Planful Workforce Planning. Our previous release, Spring20, gave you a preview of this new look, but Summer20 puts it front and center for every Planful customer. It’s a redesigned experience that enables you to customize Workforce Planning for what’s important to your business. The streamlined experience means fewer clicks, which makes it easier to get your work done faster and build more insightful plans and forecasts.

Other improvements to Workforce Planning let you customize your employee roster with the addition of compensation items or compensation attributes. You can then hide these confidential items based on user roles so that personal information is only shared with those who need it. You can now easily manage employee rosters across multiple departments simultaneously. We’ve also added advanced search functionality so it’s easier and faster to find and update information for individuals or groups of employees. 

More Dynamic Capabilities for a Continuous Planning Culture

We’re the pioneer in giving FP&A the capabilities they need to be an agile, fast, and powerful force within their organizations. This ability to dynamically change direction, respond to shifting needs, and react to business needs with confidence has always been foundational for modern FP&A. Today, they are a requirement for every company.

We launched Dynamic Collaboration in our Spring20 release, and it’s been one of our more popular new capabilities. It’s given users the power to work smarter and more efficiently within FP&A and across the business, and the Summer20 release builds on that collaborative power. We’ve added enhanced filtering, sorting, editing, and highlighting capabilities, and they’re user-specific which enables Planful to remember your preferred choices. New email notifications makes it easier to track and manage comments as you work, making sure everyone stays focused and aligned on key tasks and deliverables. You can also include comments and background narratives so that teams see the story behind the numbers, in context, for better decision-making.

Dynamic Planning also gets a performance and usability boost in Summer20 with enhanced APIs and behind-the-scenes improvements that make the entire experience faster and more intuitive. Customers are seeing data move much more quickly between financial and operational models, with transfers happening as much as 5 times faster. Also, a new and improved folder structure makes it easy to organize, locate, and work with all your various Dynamic Planning maps.

Paving the Way for Future Planful Advancements

Under the hood, Summer20 adds an exciting upgrade to our underlying database technology. This improves performance and speed, and enables new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities across the platform, with some extremely compelling use cases to unfold in subsequent releases. I don’t want to give anything away quite yet, so stay tuned for more updates on those in the near future.

Summer20 also moves us one step closer to handling all international characters, which paves the way for more countries and local language ledgers to be loaded and rendered in the Planful platform. This is a huge benefit for our international customers and makes Planful an even more powerful platform for FP&A teams around the world. 

While pushing to get Summer20 released, we’ve also enabled some of our largest customers to go live on Dynamic Planning and more than doubled our benchmarked performance measurements. And those are accomplishments that benefit all of our customers. Our product development team deserves a lot of the credit for these behind-the-scenes improvements and user-facing advancements. But so do our customers. Our innovation is driven by your continued feedback and passion for the Planful platform. It inspires us to make the product better every day, and to think well beyond your current needs today so we can get new capabilities into your hands before you even realize you need them. 

Summer20 is All Sunshine

We know times are tough for everyone these days. But we hope Summer20 makes your job easier and faster, and maybe a bit more rewarding, too. We’re continuing to pour our hearts and minds into Planful everyday. You’re the reason we do it, and we’re not stopping here. 

Every Planful customer received access to Summer20 automatically on August 21. There’s nothing you need to do. 

If you have feedback or a product suggestion, we invite you to reach out to your Planful account manager. In the meantime, we’ll be hard at work on the Fall20 product release. See you back here in a few months.

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