7 Business Benefits of Active Planning

Date posted
5 May 2020
Reading time
5 Minutes
Rachael O'Connell

7 Business Benefits of Active Planning

Most teams currently engage in static planning, a process that is not optimised to respond to and adapt to change. Characterised by long planning cycles, limited strategic analysis, siloed efforts and short-lived plans, static planning forces a compromise between getting it right and getting it done. Sound familiar? Active planning is different, it gives you the power to better manage your business by analysing and understanding historical performance to help inform and predict future performance.

An active planning process is key to accurate, agile plans that help drive business growth; active planning lets you plan and adapt without compromise. Collaborative, comprehensive and continuous active planning provides seven key business benefits:

  1. Enhanced Collaboration Using a single source of shared data accessible to the entire team through the cloud, collaborative planning empowers all stakeholders to easily engage with the information.
  2. Comprehensive View Unlock new insights with detailed and sophisticated budgeting, analysis, modelling, and forecasting that spans the entire business and understands its complexities and nuances.
  3. Faster Forecasting and Analysis Automating data collection to ensure you're always working with fresh data enables continuous planning which means you can spend more time on analysis, delivering deeper insights to benefit your business.
  4. Better Visibility Active planning provides the transparency necessary for collaborative budgeting and agile forecasting. A full audit trail makes it quick and easy to see who made changes to data or reports and when they were made.
  5. Actionable Insights Self-service reports and dashboards make it easy for teams across the business to create reports and pull data without effort. Data visualisation lets non-finance users easily see the story the numbers are telling without getting lost in rows of data, while people across the company become more empowered to present and share key financial and operational metrics. The result is a company that makes truly data-driven decisions.
  6. Improved Responsiveness Active planning allows for continuous budget planning and rolling forecasts no matter how much data you add to the process, allowing you to respond faster to a changing marketplace.
  7. Increased Confidence With a single source of truth based on comprehensive, fresh data, you'll get fewer discrepancies while knowing everyone is working with the same numbers.

How Can You Achieve Active Planning Success?

To enable active planning, you need a planning tool that's easy, powerful, and fast.

  • Easy: Allowing professionals across the business to collaborate on planning and forecasting processes without struggle.
  • Powerful: The ability to model anything and analyse everything based on a single source of truth for data-driven decision making.
  • Fast: Drive continuous planning by modelling quickly and adapting plans in real-time.

With all three of these factors in place, your business can plan and adapt without compromise to improve agility and ultimately drive business success. Learn more about active planning in our webinar Workday Adaptive Planning: Active Planning for Business Agility and Success.

About the author

Rachael O'Connell