National DCP Speeds Business Decisions with Planful

Over 2,500 finance and accounting professionals engaged with three dozen influencers, analysts, and experts at Planful Perform 2021. This is just one of the many Planful customer stories shared at Perform 2021.

When National DCP deployed Planful in 2016 as their FP&A solution, they still relied on slow, manual processes to deliver highly customized reports and insights out to the business. Finance knew Planful could streamline the process and raise the financial IQ of the business, giving the company more agility to make faster decisions.

“I was using Planful to analyze our data and identify opportunities to increase productivity, cut costs, and determine the financial feasibility of new projects,” explained Michael Zambetti, Manager, Finance & Data Analytics at National DCP. “As our experience with Planful grew, we started finding many different ways to improve the finance team’s efficiency within the organization.”

Michael then began using Planful to present insights to the C-suite and decision-makers. The response was positive, but at the time he knew Excel remained the preferred delivery mechanism for the company’s unique reports. So he set his sights on leveraging Planful to give the business more self-service power, faster insights, and turn the entire effort into a collaborative process.

If more business decision-makers were using Planful, they could get near-instant access to financial insights, whenever and however they liked. National DCP just needed to bring them on board.

“We wanted to increase their financial IQ so they could make decisions at a much quicker pace,” explained Michael. “Before, there was a lag between getting data and getting the analysis. With Planful, they could do that digging on their own.”

The company had a four-pronged approach to bringing the business onto Planful:

• Use Planful Structured Planning to increase cooperation with the business.
• Use Planful Dynamic Planning and report collections to accelerate insights and increase agility.
• Use Spotlight Excel to deliver highly customized reports in any format required.
• Use Planful dashboards to track and share metrics easily across the company.

“We used Structured Planning templates to increase collaboration and buy-in,” Michael said. “It gives the business a stake in the outcome because they’re contributing to the budgets and creating the forecasts. It also gave them instant access to analyze and report on their own numbers. It was a simple change, but very impactful.”

Moving to Planful Dynamic Planning, National DCP automated the creation of financial statements and gave everyone instant access to past reports. That eliminated delays when the business needed historical information. Then, using Planful’s substitution variables and report collections features, the company streamlined reporting and added flexibility so anyone could report across unique dimensions, drill down into certain areas, or see high-level rollups.

Spotlight Excel also became “a very, very valuable tool,” according to Michael. It empowered stakeholders to easily and quickly generate reports in unique and custom formats and with no learning curve.

“They can just click a button and their numbers come through,” added Michael. “You don’t have to train these users or talk about query functions. With Planful, it’s just one click and they’re cruising. And it’s a perfect way to tailor reports to a specific audience. If they’re familiar with a certain report format or layout, you can do that in Spotlight Excel.”

Finally, the company rolled out Planful dashboards to provide wider visibility to companywide metrics.

“We started using dashboards to track margin, profitability, and other key metrics for our executives,” Michael said. “We ended up receiving phenomenal feedback.”

With Planful’s cloud FP&A foundation in place, National DCP was able to streamline finance and accounting processes and give the business fast access to the data they need. The combination saved time, which Finance used to work more closely with their business colleagues.

“We had already reduced our month-end close process from five to three days,” Michael said. “That was a huge feat for us because now, we’re able to spend more time driving value in the rest of the organization.”

That collaboration works in the opposite direction, too. The ease of use and intuitiveness of the Planful platform gives stakeholders a key role in improving the overall financial IQ of the organization.

“A big thing driving that collaboration is letting these different stakeholders contribute directly,” Michael added. “They’re not just telling you information, they’re actually inputting it themselves into Planful. They’re a lot more likely to then buy into the decisions we make together. That’s a very, very valuable result of this company-wide adoption of Planful.”

Using automation, intelligence, and simplicity, Planful is helping National DCP make better, faster decisions. And, since the business works directly in Planful, there’s no need to wait on Finance when they need to take action.

“Our stakeholders can just go into Planful and retrieve the information themselves,” said Michael. “We don’t need to distribute reports. With the click of a button, the business can access hundreds of reports, in the Excel format they want, and even automatically email it out to their teams.”

Bringing the business into the finance and accounting processes has hastened decisions, increased collaboration, and eliminated manual effort. Using Planful, National DCP can quickly put the right information into the right hands. Those insights then give the business the agility it needs to act with confidence.

“Our ultimate goal is to drive faster business decisions,” Michael concluded. “From gathering the data to making the decision, we’ve shortened the time frame because Planful allows us to tailor reports to our target audience.”