Forecasts can make or break your business
Navigating the modern business world is challenging in so many ways. But one of the biggest challenges you can face is preparing for an uncertain future. Forward-looking forecasts are a key component of planning – both financially and operationally – but they can be fiendishly difficult to get right.
There is a solution. With IBM Planning Analytics / TM1, you can take advantage of the most advanced and dynamic forecasting tool on the market, allowing you to maximise the accuracy of your forecasts without forgoing any of your business’s complexity. Intrigued? Why not try it today?
Common challenges
Arbitrary cost drivers
Without a sophisticated view of your data, your forecasts can quickly become based on the wrong drivers, leading to inaccurate estimates.
Lack of contextual data
When you can’t collect the sort of data that can separate causation from correlation, you can end up choosing arbitrary cost drivers that approximate the truth, but actually fail in a variety of scenarios. Essentially, you’re relying on gut feel rather than your data and that can lead to all sorts of problems.
Forecasts aren’t robust
When you use inaccurate cost drivers, your forecasts aren’t robust enough to handle the multitude of changes a business can go through. This can quickly lead to wildly inaccurate estimates just one or two years out. By the time you realise the issue, your decisions have already had a negative impact.
Precise cost drivers
Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 offer a comprehensive Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) platform that not only ingests all your different data sets, but helps you identify the specific cost drivers that should be feeding your forecasts. By utilising the contextual information coming in from different sources, you can get much closer to dynamic and accurate forecasts that are adaptable to changing circumstances.
Inaccurate revenue attribution
Without a unified planning framework, you won’t fully comprehend the source of your revenue. That makes it exceedingly hard to forecast where your revenue will come from in future.
Lack of granularity
If you don’t have oversight of where your revenue is being generated, you simply don’t have the levers you need to create a sophisticated forecast. Instead, you’re stuck with relying on basic metrics that hide complexity rather than take advantage of it.
Simplistic forecasting
Overly simplistic forecasting doesn’t withstand scrutiny, nor can it account for changes in circumstances along the way. When you make decisions based on simplistic forecasts, you take risks you don’t need to. You have the data available to you – it’s just not accessible to you in the right way and within the right context.
Drill-down forecast precision
IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 provides forecasting tools that can harness your company’s complexity to deliver tremendous drill-down precision. Leverage this benefit to create accurate forecasting that uses contextual information efficiently and in an agile way. It’s a game changer.
Forecasting in silos
Forecasts should be unified so that holistic decisions can be made within the right context rather than being siloed.
Lack of data uniformity
When your data isn’t standardised and comes from a variety of sources, it becomes difficult to make forecasts that are accurate. You’re likely to make forecasts from a single perspective that is blind to other considerations.
Incomplete information
When your forecasting is siloed, you operate from a place of incomplete information. Instead of creating holistic forecasts, you’re bound by the siloed nature of your business operations. This harms the quality of your estimates and impedes accurate forecasting.
Unified planning and forecasting
Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 prides itself on delivering unified planning solutions that create truly holistic forecasts. Leverage all the data you have access to and pull it into one place where you can generate high-quality and dynamic forecasts.
Improve accuracy with a unified planning system
IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 is the closest you’re going to get to a crystal ball. It’s built to ingest all the key data that matters and allows you to build flexible and granular forecasting tools to suit any purpose. This is an integral part of any planning framework and there’s no better tool to do it.
Take your forecasts to the next level with Cubewise and you’ll discover just how powerful IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 can be. You won’t regret it.
Talk to us today and let’s overcome the challenge together.
When a system is unable to adapt to changing business circumstances, it can be tremendously frustrating for all who work with it. Things must go on, of course, and so users will resort to building tedious workarounds, simplifications and shortcuts that only serve to kick the can down the road.
Don’t accept that your business processes are incapable of adapting to fast-moving market changes. Contact us to find out how easy it can be to implement efficient and practical planning, reporting and forecasting workflows.
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