Unified Business Planning with OneStream
The Emergence of Unified Business Planning (UBP)
For most manufacturing companies today, the pursuit for improved efficiency and profitability continues to be a challenge. External realities (inconsistent demand, supply chain constraints, and commodity cost fluctuations) put a tremendous amount of uncertainty and inaccuracy into our planning and forecasting. But they have to plan well to execute well.
Unified Business Planning (UBP) represents a new paradigm—a model designed to streamline planning and analytic processes by grounding them in the reality of operational performance. The aim is clear: to enable businesses to pivot with agility, making strategic decisions informed by product-to-customer profitability. Unfortunately, this goal has been hindered by technological constraints. Existing planning systems often struggle to handle the volume of data required, forcing organizations to rely on fragmented tools and processes that compromise efficiency and accuracy.
But the status quo is changing.
A New Model Empowered by Cutting-Edge Technology
Enter OneStream Software, a revolutionary solution that breaks through scalability barriers and unifies planning processes into a single platform. This technological leap allows organizations to:
- Eliminate redundancies in managing business definitions and logic across multiple systems.
- Streamline data loading, validation, and testing.
- Consolidate and unify reporting efforts, reducing the need for duplicate versions.
More importantly, OneStream instills confidence in executive decision-making. By centralizing both your consolidated actuals and numerous planning models, it removes the uncertainties associated with metadata management, data movement and all the other “moving parts” associated with current legacy systems.
What Does “Unified Business Planning” Mean?
At its core, Unified Business Planning consolidates all financial data and processes into one platform. This approach challenges traditional models, where planning is compartmentalized into separate processes like sales forecasting, operational planning, financial planning, and more. These disconnected tools hinder collaboration and impede strategic alignment.
UBP encourages organizations to rethink their planning landscape, enabling seamless integration and greater efficiency.
How to Achieve Unified Business Planning
- Build a Foundation with Consolidated Financial Reporting Begin by ensuring accurate and unified financial definitions and logic. Starting with your consolidated financial reporting provides a reliable baseline, removing uncertainty from plan-versus-actual comparisons.
- Deliver Executive Dashboards for Visibility Start with the end in mind. Develop executive dashboards to visually communicate insights and align expectations. Even before implementing new planning capabilities, existing plan data can be integrated to provide immediate value.
- Leverage Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Align sales, operations, and finance by integrating demand modeling and profitability analysis into a cohesive framework. OneStream facilitates:
- Demand Modeling with multiple scenarios
- Driver-based or sales-input demand planning.
- Customer Price Management (manage customer price adjustments and changes)
- Detailed part-level profitability analysis (down to Bill of Material).
- Extend Planning Across Your Organization Once core S&OP capabilities are in place, expand planning workflows to include:
- SG&A Budgeting: Integrate departmental budgets and workflows in alignment with your demand models.
- Capital Planning: Manage the Capital Project approval process (with multiple levels of approvals, documentation support and notifications) and then track the expenses (and ROI) of the investment decisions with their financial impacts.
- Headcount Planning: Align headcount planning with your current workflows and financial models.
- Cash Flow Planning: Incorporate detailed receivables and purchasing data into the system for cash flow analysis (by customer, part, plant, etc).
Why OneStream Stands Out
While many vendors claim to support UBP, few can match the breadth and depth of OneStream’s capabilities. Key differentiators include:
- Extensible Dimensionality: Manage multiple hierarchies with varying levels of granularity as a single structure, simplifying updates and ensuring consistency.
- Data Blending: Accommodate diverse data types without scalability limitations, aligning them through extensible dimensionality.
- Unified Workflow and Reporting: Provide a consistent user experience across all financial and planning processes. Reports and data integrations are built once and reused seamlessly. Workflow is identical across all your reporting, planning and analytic processes enhancing change management.
Conclusion
Unified Business Planning with OneStream is a game-changer for organizations seeking operational excellence and strategic alignment. By consolidating financial and operational processes, OneStream empowers businesses to make informed decisions with confidence and agility. Embracing UBP ensures resilience and positions your organization to achieve long-term success in an ever-evolving marketplace.
Why Strategic iQ is Uniquely Qualified to Help You with UBP
Strategic iQ specializes in helping manufacturers achieve the vision of UBP. We are experts in implementing OneStream, and one of only a few Certified Development Partners. This means that we understand how to take full advantage of some of the most sophisticated capabilities of OneStream. This has enabled us to build OneStream’s first industry-specific solution on their Solution Exchange designed specifically for the Sales & Operational Planning needs of our manufacturing customers. Strategic iQ’s Planning Factory is an accelerator. It allows us to implement complex S&OP functionality at a significantly faster timeframe and at a significantly lower cost than consulting only options.
