Planning

Plan smarter and transform decision-making to take full control of performance

Board is an Intelligent Planning Platform that integrates strategy, finance, and operations, enabling full control of performance across the organization.

Unlike spreadsheets, Board’s multidimensional enterprise planning system is based on a single shared data repository and offers data validation, workflow, enterprise-class security, audit trail and versioning capabilities. This enhances control and efficiency across the entire planning process - making it fully reliable in terms of results and significantly less onerous in terms of time and resources.

Capabilities: Planning Image 1

Plan and Analyze in Real Time

Board’s in-memory technology (HBMP) delivers outstanding performance in aggregating, spreading, and running calculations on large data sets with complex business models and thousands of users. All changes to data are automatically spread across dimensions and hierarchies, providing an instantaneous picture of the overall impact of any single variation.

Since they are based on the same unified metadata layer, all the applications, reports and analyses are updated in real time, maintaining a single version of the truth across the whole Board environment and creating a fully integrated planning supply chain.

Make your planning agile with Board’s dynamic data model

Board offers the ability to directly modify the data model during the planning or forecasting process, throughout the entire integrated business planning process flow. A new business unit, a new product, a new market or a different investment can be inserted in a controlled way during a planning cycle, simulating the effect of a new scenario on the whole business model. Furthermore, structures and relationships can be changed at runtime, providing unparalleled flexibility in building and maintaining any planning application.

Take advantage of cutting-edge data entry capabilities

Board offers a powerful set of advanced features that provide unparalleled flexibility and effectiveness in relation to data entry processes, while ensuring full data reliability.



Validation

Data entry can be easily controlled by defining a set of validation rules for any input value (i.e. minimum price for a product)

Role-based security

The data available for visualisation or enabled for data entry varies according to the role of the user

Offline access

Board’s Excel® add-in allows users to work without being connected to Board and to synchronize data automatically when they first reconnect

Cell freezing

Board allows users to freeze the value of one or more cells, including totals or subtotals, and then distribute data changes to non-locked cells only

Handling of calculated fields

A special function called “reverse algorithm” extends the capability to propagate changes across dimensions and hierarchies to the calculated fields (e.g. If you change a percentage value this will be automatically reflected in the quantities from which the percentage has been generated, even if the percentage is a calculated value)

Real time conversion and calculation

Any data entered in Board can be recalculated in real time. This function is typically used to enter data in one currency and to have it immediately available in several different currency formats.

Allocation models

Users can input a value and spread it to a more detailed level through allocation patterns that they can easily define, adjust and simulate (i.e. the total Business Plan revenue for the year can be phased in months, based on a different calendarization hypothesis)

ERP database write-back

Thanks to its relational engine, and unlike other planning solutions, Board can automatically write back the outcomes of any budget/data-entry cycle directly into the ERP database, effectively integrating transactional and planning systems.

Effortlessly implement fully customized workflow

Board’s planning process includes built-in workflow management, which includes conditional alerting and mailing, cell locking and triggered events, and data auditing and validation processes. Planning steps can be easily created and correlated to approval cycles according to the logic behind the process. Personalized Excel and Word-based reports can be broadcasted at scheduled times or when a specific event occurs. Unlike the reports from typical planning systems, analyses within Board are completely interactive, and once received, allow users to interact on-the-fly with the data, according to their role-based security profiles. Inbuilt analytics guarantees a strong capability to monitor and represent workflow cycles, through interactive control panels and dashboards.

Create sophisticated business rules without coding

Board’s planning software procedures engine allows users to effectively model key business processes by easily configuring a set of pre-built rules. Such processes include driver-based allocations, eliminations, conversions, consolidations, initializations, top down and bottom-up reconciliations, value calendarization, multidimensional calculations and, more generally, all the necessary operations to implement company-wide planning, forecasting, simulation applications.

Manage unlimited scenarios and versions

Board enables the generation of unlimited plan versions and scenarios, such as operating plans and financial plans, making it easy to track the evolution of forecasts and plans over time and to compare them with results.

Next Capability: Simulation