Beyond spreadsheets with IBM Planning Analytics

My journey with IBM Planning Analytics began with a phone call early in the morning to inform me that a member of my team had died, suddenly and unexpectedly. His loss was not only a personal tragedy, it was a tragedy for the entire organization. Our teams relied heavily on its decades of experience to help us plan and forecast strategically for the future.

The company had gone through hard times in general. A costly implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) meant that there was no money to other systems and we were forced to run our budget process in a network complicated of 27 worksheets linked. Fred was the only one who knew how it worked, and suddenly was no longer there.

If there was ever an example of a risk of a key person, it was this.

A world without worksheets

We stumble our way through the next budget process as best we could, until we met with IBM Planning Analytics with Watson . We were able to see, for the first time, a world that could exist without worksheets. We could see a world in which people will work together in a common tool using an approach common to join and agree to data-based decisions for the good of the business. Better still, it was a world that did not depend on a single person.

But the story doesn't end there.

Give meaning to data

Once we leave the spreadsheets, we discover the power that comes from the data management. We found countless problems with our master data, all of which had been masked by the aggregation of worksheets. We had been blissfully unaware of these challenges for years and now was the time to tackle them. To have full visibility of our data with IBM Planning Analytics, we were finally able to make sense of all of our data together.

These problems were not trivial. In fact, we find examples in which the costs of our products were significantly inaccurate and we discovered that we had been selling some products below cost to manufacture them. Through updates, manuals, spreadsheets, and working at a high level, the errors, even those that seemed obvious, hiding in plain sight.

I have little doubt that our investment in IBM Planning Analytics is redeemed multiple times. Not only mitigate the risk of the key person, that honestly is all I wanted to do, but we won a lot more. We did that the organization values their data and want to put them to work for the good of the business.

Unlock the value of data with the promise of AI

It is often difficult for leaders to see the value of analytics tools. The worksheets seem to be ok, but they are not. You eased into a false sense of security. Not only the business logic associated with the owner of the spreadsheet is a risk in and of itself, but the simple simplicity of the worksheet to hide the countless treasures that it contains.

The promise of AI is tempting. You can provide information that humans could never find. But realistically, can we expect to get there if the business still thinks in rows and columns? The untimely death of our colleague, expert it was a tragedy, but we thank him every day for his legacy. I encourage business leaders who want to have a real impact on your final results to explore a solution for integrated planning continued as IBM Planning Analytics, which eliminates manual work and helps you to:

• Enable planning processes automated
• Encourage collaboration cross-functional
• Incorporates the capabilities of artificial intelligence predictive for prognosis predictive accurate

If you wish to obtain more information, including how to create plans, budgets and forecasts, multi-dimensional, explore dashboards and interactive reports and discover solutions pre-engineered for industry or use case, you can start today with a demonstration of IBM Planning Analytics with Watson.

Write to us to request a business meeting.