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TRANSFORMING GREAT STRATEGIES INTO GREAT RESULTS

Driving Performance With BusinessObjects Planning XI BusinessObjects Planning provides the integrated planning and budgeting applications you need to reduce planning cycle time, increase reporting accuracy, and improve transparency across your organization. The solution is easily accessible through online and offline options, letting you foster bottom-up and top-down collaboration, ensure organizational buy-in, and drive accountability.



Many organizations view budgeting as a necessary evil. Time-consuming, multilayered, and complex, the budgeting process is prone to errors and often disconnected from corporate strategy. However, when executed correctly, budgeting is a critical step in planning and controlling day-to-day operations.

BusinessObjects Planning brings control and visibility to your budgeting process while giving users the flexibility to understand and represent the changing needs of their departments. Administrators apply strategic goals and top-down targets to the budget while users make updates and track progress toward these goals. Knowing plans align with corporate goals, decision-makers approve submissions the first time, minimizing iterations and cycle time.



Key to successful planning is creating a collaborative environment where managers succinctly communicate the staffing requirements and resources they need to meet corporate goals. Because BusinessObjects Planning allows your administrators to define required information upfront, all relevant data is provided throughout the budgeting process, ensuring necessary approvals. Your managers can dynamically add resources to their budgets, utilize freeform Excel work areas to create their own models, provide additional supporting information, and incorporate and share information throughout the approval process. This highly collaborative environment not only streamlines the planning process, but also enhances accountability and increases budgetary ownership within all business units as well.

BusinessObjects Planning comes equipped with capabilities to meet your unique requirements:

• Accommodate rolling forecasts, flexible budgeting, and long-term forecasting
• Send automatic alerts to notify users when targets are not being met or submissions are running late
• Apply sophisticated what-if analyses to evaluate various options and decide on the best course of action
• Create conditional statements and multitiered business rules
• Automate complex calculations such as currency conversions and allocations
• Utilize multiple user-access methods, including over the web, offline, or on the desktop

Specialized Methods for Handling Payroll Planning Employees are your most valuable – and expensive – asset. So it is critical that your payroll planning is accurate. Unfortunately, most planning tools can't help you track open positions, create ad hoc requests for new employees, or elegantly handle the multiple variables and sophisticated calculations associated with payroll planning. With no way to support what-if analyses, it's difficult to identify the best payroll plans and make the right staffing decisions.



BusinessObjects Planning offers powerful planning tools designed to provide visibility into your payroll planning and answer key questions, such as:

• Which units are adding staff?
• Which managers have open positions?
• Is the new payroll plan strategically aligned?

Supporting multitiered and variable calculations, BusinessObjects Planning helps you project payroll expenses precisely and perform unlimited what-if scenario analyses – while allowing department managers to request new staff and provide the necessary justification for changes. To accommodate your unique needs, BusinessObjects Planning lets you define any number of payroll statistics – including pay tables, benefits, and payroll taxes. Combining payroll data with your predefined payroll statistics and calculations ensures you produce accurate forecasts in less time.

Visibility for Today and Tomorrow Every company wants to avoid making important business decisions based on out-of-date and inaccurate information. You need comprehensive reporting capabilities that deliver the right information to the right people at the right time to support critical decisions that improve corporate performance.



With BusinessObjects Planning, you gain the power and flexibility you need to make confident business decisions – decisions based on the most up-to-date and accurate data available from every corner of your business. You can easily share this information with thousands of employees across your company. Embedded reporting allows real-time views of your plan or forecast, and reports can be delivered over the web, in PDF, or live within Microsoft Excel. However, unlike static spreadsheets, the data BusinessObjects Planning presents is always current and secure. Your key decision-makers are able to easily monitor areas of importance and see – at a glance – which ones are performing as planned and which ones require attention. And, with the ability to drill down into the details of your data, you gain a better understanding of underlying business issues or root causes of any given result.

What's more, BusinessObjects Planning is fully integrated with BusinessObjects Enterprise XI R2, supporting specialized end-user tools for reporting, query and analysis, and analytic applications on a scalable, open services-oriented architecture.

A Comprehensive Solution BusinessObjects Planning provides the foundation for a complete set of tailored planning applications, supporting specialized process, reporting, and industry requirements. Each additional application offers predefined templates, reports, and functions to extend the reach of BusinessObjects Planning to new users and processes. By adding applications to your BusinessObjects Planning deployment, you ensure that every action within every department works to support your corporate goals – ultimately driving improved performance. Additional applications from Business Objects include:

• Strategic planning
• Capital planning
• Forecasting
• Consolidations
• Productivity management
• Scorecarding
• Sales planning
• Industry extensions for healthcare, banking, insurance, retail, and hospitality, and leisure

Enterprise Performance Management BusinessObjects Planning XI is an enterprise performance management (EPM) solution from Business Objects. EPM empowers our customers to align people, processes and technologies around common plans so they can execute and optimize their business strategies. It delivers an integrated framework for companies to plan their business, measure performance, take action based on trusted data, and reward people based on their performance. To find out more about Business Objects EPM solutions, visit www.businessobjects.com.

Source: Business Objects

Featured White Papers

Linking Strategic Plans to Operational Goals

Optimizing Enterprise Performance through Financial Intelligence

Upcoming Events:

CFO Rising West – Sept. 30 – Oct 3

Driver Based Budgeting Web Seminar – August 25

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