SPEEDING UP PLANNING & BUDGETING.

• Author: Reiff, Stephen D.

Rapid technological change is fostering the ability to enhance collaborative processes throughout organizations. Internet- and intranet-enabled tools, although not the panacea they were recently envisioned to be, are being increasingly and intelligently employed to fulfill a variety of functions for the enterprise. A fertile area for these technologies is in the planning and budgeting process.

Corporate planning and budgeting processes are well-suited to benefit from the Internet and other Web-enabled collaborative tools, for a number of reasons.

Enterprise-Wide Participation. First, organizations are requiring increasingly greater input from line managers during the development of corporate budgets. Gone are the days when a small group of financial analysts were solely responsible for the physical development and compilation of budgets. Collaborative, Web-based software tools facilitate the distribution of the planning process to a wider audience.

Faster Feedback and Response. Secondly, budgeting and planning processes are inherently iterative. Organizations must "see where they're at" before making prescriptive changes. As the speed of business continues to accelerate, organizations are requiring faster feedback/response cycles in the planning process. Internet collaborative tools can help speed up that cycle.

Low-Cost Deployment. Finally, Internet-based planning tools typically (although not always) offer low-cost deployment. For example, the client-side program code may be "packaged" within a Web page, or all of the business intelligence may be maintained on the server, lessening the IT and labor costs associated with deployment.

Unique Challenges

Successfully adapting planning and budgeting processes to the Internet environment presents unique challenges. Planning and budgeting are inherently different from the typical domain of Web-based applications (such as B2B or B2C) in that they require intelligent modeling.

Intelligent modeling goes way beyond the basic "x times y." For example, it allows the calculation of employee benefit costs based on specific job classes and contracts. Or, it enables predictive forecasting of sales volumes based on complex historical trends. In short, intelligent modeling allows organizations to build a true picture of their business environments based on real-life, complex and sophisticated relationships.

Simple data-input grids or forms of departmental revenues and costs are not adequate tools for intelligent modeling. Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors have offered these simplistic mechanisms for years, yet most...