Securely Plan Who, What, Where, and When at the Lowest Level

您如何安全地计划谁，什么，何时和何时处于最低水平？计划通常会倒塌的地方是您尝试将计划成果与运营决策结合起来。在计划中，您可以根据历史趋势做出高水平的决定，这些决策通常被认为是准确的。最好使用手头上所有可用的信息，并且没有蝙蝠手机来cleo the Psychic，这是您最好的选择，这是您最好的选择。我的问题不是这个概念，或者您是否使用2年的复合年增长率与3个月的平均滚动平均值，这是如何应用计划假设以及执行方式的方式。

Anyone in the business of creating a forecast for the future that has tried to turn the assumptions they’ve made into actionable results knows how difficult that can be. One of the primary reasons is that the finance and operational clocks are different. Finance thinks in terms of quarters (or maybe even months if you have a bold team with some decent tools), while operations thinks in terms of weeks or even days. This means creating an actionable plan that ties to the finance view in terms of expectations starts out with an enormous reconcilement challenge.

The next biggest challenge is going from the aggregate in terms of geographies, segments, channels, people, products, etc… to the finite. Big plans are created across big subsets. For example, when creating a quarterly volume plan you might look at regions such as Americas/Europe/Asia, then break down products by high-level product categories such as Hardware/Software/Services. Maybe you even go down to a channel level and compare direct versus indirect or partner sales. Here the problem with relating the forecast to actionable plans is similar in that operations needs to know exactly where, who, and what, to go with the when. Without execution detail to reference on the plan the teams end up building their own plans that may or may not tie out to the high-level executive strategy. Even if you have a robust process around marrying these two together you end up with inconsistencies driven by my favorite Excel issues: emailing different versions of the plan back and forth resulting in confusion on the latest iteration, troubles with concurrent users accessing the same files over a network, and summarizing spreadsheets collected from numerous sites and teams into one cohesive plan.

Finally, the last but possibly even greatest challenge can be in making sure the numbers tie out. Are the high-level figures by location, time, and product matching the low-level build-up from the teams in the field? When these numbers don’t match you can end up with differences in product and timing mix that results in profit misses or shifts in seasonality that weren’t communicated or expected.

The answer lies in using a system that not only ties the top-down process to the bottoms-up directly, allowing for reconcilement and analysis of gaps, but in creating a top-down plan that goes ALL THE WAY DOWN. Take your assumptions at a regional level for growth and see the actual impact at a SKU/Loc level. When you grow each SKU by its own CAGR rather than the group CAGR you’ll generally get a much more accurate result, with a rolled up number that could be quite different than would be built by staying at a high level. With a top-down plan at the lowest level you can actually compare apples-to-apples with the field teams’ assumptions and understand opportunities with a granularity never possible before. Put this system in the cloud and you’ll have a system that the entire team worldwide can access, review results in real-time, and everyone will always be on the same version of the truth.

Tuesdays with our Solutions Consultants is updated the last Tuesday of every month on the Anaplan Blog. Interested in connecting with Tom to discuss this post further? Get in touch with him:@tommyj314or us:@anaplanand let’s talk!

关于作者：自2012年4月以来，汤姆·琼斯（Tom Jones）一直担任Anaplan担任解决方案顾问。汤姆（Tom）通过在包括医疗保健，银行业，运输物流和零售等各种行业的经验中借鉴经验来帮助团队向客户展示Anaplan平台的价值。在加入Anaplan之前，汤姆（Tom）帮助定义并建立了最佳实践财务建模，计划和分析工具，即娱乐集团的高级财务分析师。他拥有明尼苏达大学的计算机科学学士学位，以及明尼苏达大学卡尔森管理学院的金融学学士学位。