Rocket Software Uses Planful Predict to Bring AI Into the Office of the CFO

Rocket Software, which offers IT modernization and IT automation solutions, selected Planful to pull finance, human resources, and its business leaders out of spreadsheets and onto a modern solution to streamline and improve its workforce planning processes. For its finance team, Planful enabled a modern, accelerated approach to finance processes, but they wanted more, specifically to move to rolling forecasts. So, they added Planful Predict and now use its native artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to spot potential errors and create hyper-accurate forecasts in just a few clicks.

Rocket Software started using Planful to modernize its workforce planning processes and its financial planning efforts across financial reporting, forecasting, and more. Planful helps the company’s finance, accounting, and business teams collaborate more effectively while centralizing data from Oracle ERP, Workday human resources, Snowflake, and other systems into a single source of truth. With Planful as the foundation, Rocket Software has a comprehensive financial performance management platform to enable more speed, accuracy, and confidence across the company’s global operations.

Luis Martinez, Sr. Manager, FP&A at Rocket Software had this to say, “Planful helps us make finance relevant to operations so we’re speaking the same language and can focus more on key strategic decisions.”

But Luis wanted more and kept pushing to modernize and accelerate how Rocket Software’s finance and accounting teams worked so they could provide more timely and accurate information to the business. However, with speed comes the potential for errors, and even small mistakes or seemingly minor forecasting decisions can snowball into massive miscalculations. What Luis needed was an intelligent assistant that could spot errors and guide the creation of more accurate, actuals-based forecasts, all while helping Luis scale his team. Planful Predict provided the answer.

“We developed a repeatable forecasting process in Planful, and then quickly moved to rolling forecasts,” Luis said. “But when creating forecasts, we might not capture the seasonality of our business, for example. Planful Predict looks at our historical data and highlights anomalies where our inputs might not match with those historical trends. It is a great way to pressure test our assumptions and add value to our decision-making.”

Planful Predict is a suite of AI-powered solutions that help the Office of the CFO, budget owners, and business leaders make confident, informed financial decisions with greater accuracy. Planful Predict identifies patterns in historical data, uses that information to check for errors, and augments financial performance management efforts with intelligent forecast recommendations—all using an AI engine natively integrated into Planful.

“We can lean on Planful Predict to rationalize our hiring pace by creating upper and lower bounds or pointing out where something looks odd,” added Luis. “That helps us have a meaningful dialogue with the business, know where to ask questions, or see where someone accidentally added an extra zero. Best of all, we can do that at scale, without adding finance resources.”

Like any business, the multitude of departments, legal entities, and GL combinations at Rocket Software create tens of thousands of data points its teams must comb through to ensure accuracy and weed out potential errors and misjudgments. Planful Predict Signals enables Rocket Software to scale by eliminating hours of manual error-checking and, as they look to rollout Predict Projections, even more hours of manual forecasting.

“Not only will we be able to produce higher quality variance analysis in Planful because we’re able to get more granular data in our forecast, but we can leverage that granularity for new use cases—things like tax, treasury, analytics—without adding resources,” Luis concluded. “What we’re able to get from Planful and Planful Predict, plus the business user experience, lets us start to move towards true xP&A so we can bring more value to the business.”

With Planful Predict taking on those manual efforts, Luis can then focus on guiding the business in making better, faster financial decisions. Paired with Planful’s business user experience, Rocket Software will extend these AI/ML benefits to help non-finance users create more accurate forecasts in the shortest possible time.