Annual Planning Process
The Annual Planning Process (especially for manufacturers) is painful. As you know, spreadsheets are prone to delays, errors, and other “accidents” – especially when you consider the challenges of versioning, maintaining consistency across plants, aligning actuals, and analyzing across legal entities, companies, or groups. As it usually happens, when leadership suggests a different what-if scenario, it’s hours of work – and still leaves blind spots. The question is: does your plan support your strategy, or is it merely an admin function you happen to support?
Annual Planning (and Forecasting) can be greatly streamlined, enriched, and improved with a single platform that is easy for everyone (finance, line of business, and plants) to use and report from. This is what Strategic iQ and OneStream do best.
Key Results from Clients:
- Data and Plan Automation – Plant Controllers “receive” their plan now. Instead of having to build them up, they can use drivers to formulate their baseline. Then, they can adjust their volumes, pricing, and cost expectations with commentary and auditable control.
- Part-Level Profitability – Our solution helps clients calculate their Actual Costs every month at the same pace that it takes them to close the books.
- Driver-Based Volumes – Sales teams can leverage EDI, IHSMarkit, Historical Performance, Customer Orders, AI Forecasting and even Capacity thresholds to determine Volumes.
- Annual Plan Cycle Time Reduction (by 65%) – Clients spend significantly more time analyzing the business and less time walking through the mechanics of creating their plans.
- Monthly Forecasts – Take 1 to 1.5 days to update
