Choosing the right Planning System: A 5-Step Evaluation Framework

In a dynamic technology landscape, businesses require stronger planning systems to support their growth while also staying lean and nimble. At Amvent, we believe there is a significant amount of friction built into organizations using legacy planning systems. 

The fatigue associated with learning and implementing a new technology, hiring the right resources, driving internal adoption and managing the ongoing maintenance of said technology causes organizations to shy away from change (even if it might be good for them). We strongly encourage organizations to look beyond switching costs (both monetary and resource based) and conduct an objective evaluation of their current technology stack. This not only helps the business move forward and stay agile, but also makes the operators’ lives easier by adopting more modern and streamlined technologies.

Our team has created a 5-step evaluation framework that can help businesses evaluate and attain buy-in to invest in the right planning systems:

1. Assess pain points with the current system

2. Create an evaluation matrix customized to your business needs

3. Identify opportunities created by implementing the new system

4. Identify risks and mitigation plans

5. Quantify efficiency gains (time, resourcing, costs)

While these steps might seem obvious on the surface, they can serve as a framework that can be tweaked to suit different business needs. Let's dig in.

Step 1: Assess pain points with the current system

Every technology comes with its own set of challenges. We encourage organizations to take an objective look at their current planning system and assess any existing pain points through the lens of different stakeholder groups:

• End-users

• System Admins

• Business Leaders

For each pain-point experienced by these stakeholder groups, there is an associated risk or potential opportunity cost. For example, here are a few pain points we often see our customers facing with legacy planning technologies along with the stakeholder group that identifies the pain point:

Rigid Reporting and UX

• Identified By: End-users

• Associated Risk: Cumbersome analysis leading to an inefficient process

Lack of self-serve capabilities

• Identified By: End-users

• Associated Risk: Manual interventions making the process error prone

Complex set up and architecture

• Identified By: System Admins

• Associated Risk: Significant upkeep requirements creating key personnel risk and preventing agility

Slow product velocity

• Identified By: Business Leaders

• Associated Risk: Outdated tooling, unresolved core platform issues, lack of focus on emerging technologies (eg. weak AI roadmap)

  
  

Step 2: Create an evaluation matrix customized to your business needs

Having a formal framework set up to evaluate and assess different options can help streamline decision making. This is where an evaluation matrix can help. Every business looks different but there are some common themes that can be tested for - below is an example of what the matrix can look like:

Step 3: Identify opportunities created by implementing the new system

In order to attain buy-in from key decision makers internally, it is important to highlight the opportunities presented by the new technology solution being proposed. 

Here are some of the opportunities that come with implementing a best-in-class solution like Pigment (for a more in depth overview of Pigment's capabilities, check out our blog here): 

AI

• Despite the current hype surrounding AI, there is a clear opportunity to transform and optimize processes within Finance, HR, Sales and other functions. With this in mind, the ability to incorporate and leverage AI must be one of the key baseline criteria during evaluation processes today.

• Pigment AI represents the most robust offering among any planning system today including:

  • Ability to get answers with instant queries

    

    
    

  • Automated Scenario Planning

    

    
    

  • Automated Workflows

    

    
    

  • Ability to summarize insights automatically

    

Centralized Reporting

• Pigment’s UX capabilities are unparalleled and can enable customers to consolidate disparate spreadsheets in one holistic view. Businesses can uplevel their reporting by leveraging Pigment in order to: 

  • Gain more visibility into key metrics on a frequent cadence 

  • Connect the dots through intuitive visualizations and easily digestible reports 

  • Increase confidence in budgets by gaining a better understanding of the full picture during planning periods

    
    

    

    
    

Step 4: Identify Risks and Mitigation Plans

We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the fact that every system comes with its own set of risks but what is more important is the mitigation strategy and how consequential the risks are. 

A few of the common risks associated with legacy planning systems include:

Key personnel risk

Concentration of system knowledge with one or a small group of individuals creating a dependency within the team which is hard to break out of.

• Mitigation strategy: Building a strong foundation of power users within the team along with consistent documentation and knowledge sharing.

Tech-Debt

The implementation of complex models can lead to accumulation of tech debt over time. This is especially true for legacy planning systems that require countless workarounds and specialized know-how in order to keep the system running.

• Mitigation strategy: Choosing modern technologies like Pigment that inherently solve for a lot of the technical limitations associated with legacy solutions accompanied by high quality documentation.

User Enablement

A system implementation should only be considered a success if it is accompanied by significant user adoption and enablement. Forcing end-users to use a tool that only works for a smaller subset within the team causes pain and frustration leading to a bad user experience overall.

• Mitigation strategy: Identifying key user groups ahead of time and bringing them along the ride during the implementation - collecting regular user feedback and gaining gradual traction rather than rolling out the solution all at once.

Step 5: Quantify Efficiency Gains

Technology should be synonymous with efficiency and your current planning system should be consistently improving your processes. We recommend our customers quantify the efficiency gained (or lack thereof) with their existing tooling by asking a few questions:

How much time has the team saved by implementing the current system? 

• Caveat: How does this compare to the time investment required to maintain the system? Oftentimes, the time savings are offset by time invested in implementing and managing the system so we encourage customers to compare both to reach a more informed conclusion.

How many users were using the previous tool compared to the current tool? Has adoption accelerated or stalled?

• Comparing total provisioned users vs. total active users can also be a useful measure in gauging user adoption.

How many resources were required to manage the previous solution compared to the current?

• In other words, how does the maintenance burden compare to efficiency gained (if any)? 

Here is an example of how Pigment customers have measured and quantified their efficiency gains:

A combination of the 5 steps outlined above can lead to a successful and objective evaluation of your current and prospective EPM system of choice. Our customers at Amvent have used this framework and chosen Pigment over other technologies. 

Interested in learning more? Chat with us!