Planful for life!
Modules Used
- Modeling
- Planning
- Consolidation
- Reporting and Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Planful (formerly Host Analytics)
The Dynamic Planning area has been incredibly useful for us as a professional services firm. We've been building models to use for our planning and forecasting purposes.
- Sales / Revenue Planning
- Consolidations
- Financial Modeling
- Reporting
- Dashboards
- Planning
- Forecasting
- Operational Planning
- Driver Based Planning
- Financial Automation
- We haven't really had any problems
- We've saved weeks completing plans and forecasts in Planful.
- Dissemination of data is much quicker and easier.
- Quality of forecasts is much higher.
- Able to incorporate multiple key drivers into our planning process and use them to help improve and automate the planning process.
- We've been able to decentralize the planning process.
- We have been able to easily move to a rolling forecast process.
We have been able to pull in data from various sources, have the system perform lookups and calculations utilizing the various modeling capabilities, and basically do all the heavy lifting. Now we just have to enter in a few key data points and the system does all the calculations. Reporting, (Variance, Trend,...) is so quick and easy. Much better than other vendors I've seen, and definitely way better than any reporting out of the ERP. We love the automated report bursting across the company.
It really isn't hard. There isn't really any coding. It's all point and click or Excel based formulas. Everything is intuitive and pretty easy to use.
As long as you know basic Excel language and maybe have used a pivot table (conceptually similar), you should be fine.
Planful is inherently easier (I know Excel and I don't want to have to learn a new coding language) [and] has more capability and power due to the underlying multi-dimensional architecture (i.e. it can scale much better as you grow). The Dynamic Planning piece is very similar to Hyperion Smart View, Essbase, TM1 and it is only one piece of the overall application. There is just so much you can do with this system.