Partner

Platform Specialists

At Platform Specialists, we enable smarter financial and operational decision-making through technology solutions and industry expertise. Our clients leverage the Anaplan platform to drive agile finance, which is predicated on having actionable forecasts available real-time and without the need for a massive manual effort.

How do you help solve your customers’ challenges?

Our customers want to focus their efforts in two main areas:

  1. Making more informed business decisions using data-backed insights
  2. Breaking down the ‘finance team’ silo to make planning a more company-wide process

We encourage our clients to consider more advanced algorithmic forecasting techniques based on historical data and statistical modeling. At the very least, we believe that having the aid of a statistical forecast to serve as the basis for a plan is an absolute must and a huge value-add. This type of modeling saves time and cost associated with the more mechanical and Excel-driven ‘guesstimates’ that we see a lot in the market. It also challenges planners to justify why and how trends are changing. The exercise provides huge insight into where the true ‘levers’ are for impacting results.

Case study

Situation:In a recent project for a Fortune 50 client, we leveraged statistical forecasting methodologies to model out product revenue and back-tested against historical bottoms-up’ forecasts done outside of the system.

Impact:The result was a set of more accurate forecasts coming from Anaplan, which will be used to guide decision-making going forward. Our goal is to expand the use of statistical forecasting and machine learning to take the guesswork, manual data gathering, and lengthy forecast cycles out of the equation in expanded uses cases within the company.