Kepion is a cloud planning & analytics software company
that connects all organizations' teams under a single view of their business
performance. We enable more intelligent decisions to be made by companies about
their financial and operational future.
Kepion global offices and partners deliver rapid solutions
for mid-size and enterprise customers. We make it possible for businesses to be
empowered with real-time analytics, what-if scenario modeling, and the ability
to model complex…
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Planful
Score 8.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
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Kepion Planning
Planful
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On premise Install
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Kepion Planning
Planful
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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No setup fee
Additional Details
Please contact us at sales@kepion.com for more details.
The solution works extremely well for companies in complicated operations or with the ambition to forecast their operations on a driver based way or wanting to have the ability to create different scenarios based on external or internal drivers. It is a perfect piece of an existing analytical infrastructure (DWH/BI) lacking a planning solution on top.
Planful makes it very easy to roll forward forecasts and conduct scenario analyses. I'm also a big fan of their reporting and how easy it is to distribute a report burst to satisfy all the needs and questions of our SLT. Lastly, their latest developments in the AI space make it easy to quickly identify outlier projections.
Budgeting and Forecasting: Kepion provides all budgeting, forecasting and actuals information in one, collaborative environment.
Analysis: It is easy to traverse across your entire budgeting and forecasting spectrum in Kepion, unearthing insights that would be hidden from you in other tools.
Workflow: Kepion's workflow management is simple and clear.
Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅
Silverlight functionality is outdated which makes the front end solution a little bit old compared to latest UI. They will be tackling it in Q2 2018, but it leaves users wanting for more.
Reporting functionalities: Are not state of the art, we recommend users creating official reports within Kepion, but focusing on Tableau or PowerBI for reporting purposes as this is not and will never be Kepion strengths compared to the likes of Tableau.
Being customizable is great, however, the solution is not an out-of-the-box solution and does require a little integration to work. For smaller companies (under 5M USD) I would still recommend Excel.
Multiple currency calculations/ consolidations support IFRS accounting
Ability to inactivate old data dimensions
Reporting - Need ability to expand all/collapse all lines easily
Reporting - Formula exceptions added to a report do not update when information is revised.
Automatic Sandbox refreshes initiated by Planful - When Planful does an automatic refresh of the sandbox environment, it copies any Boomi/integration connections.
Limited to 8 data dimensions in core application
Add more API connectors to make data integration easier
ability to transfer sandbox tests to production environment
Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
A few years ago I participated in a lot of their online learning. Their references have grown over the years and continue to get better and better. We use it throughout the year to update the information we hold internally for documentation and to educate ourselves on all of the new release notes and features within Planful.
After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.
Kepion is in a unique position in that it has all of the enterprise-grade functionality and scalability of a tool like Cognos, but it is available at a lower price point, with much more engaged support.
Planful seems to do a better job of pulling things in a format that is more understandable to an accounting-minded person, whereas the other platforms seem more focused on operations. From a detail perspective, Planful provides more powerful and complete data, in my experience. When using a platform for financial planning and budgeting, the details are critical and the ability to match the GL structure and pull full P&L data has been a big improvement from Qlik, which we used previously.
I give this rating simply because I have first-hand knowledge of the scalability of Planful when working across departments in our company that use different financial systems. We have one team on InEight and another using SAP. When we implemented it, we only customized the system to accommodate one of these financial platforms, but when we considered expanding the use of Planful to other departments, we were able to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate our needs.
We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report.
Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year
With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily
