I use it for consolidation and forecasting.
It has helped us speed up the turnaround time on our consolidation, and we haven't had anything come up that the program has not been able to solve
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Our planning cycle used to take about six months, and a part of that was just having to develop templates in Excel, send them out to our various organizations and foreign subsidiaries, and then manually consolidate them. Planful has probably cut our time in half, given that we can now leverage the cloud-based services to interact with our subs for getting their forecast inputs.
What is most valuable?
It has helped us speed up the turnaround time on our consolidation. We don't have to do reporting in Excel anymore, which has cut down on the errors and the efficiency of our close time.
What needs improvement?
The part that we liked about Excel is that it had a better interface in terms of just graphical illustration of our results. So, if we wanted to look at our financial trends and put it into some type of graphical interface for people to look at, we still have to leverage Excel for that. The dashboards aren't as usable as maybe some of the other solutions, such as Tableau or other BI tools.
The application that we use today for our BI tools is Tableau. That's how people absorb information. We don't really use the functionality or dashboards within Planful because of the robustness of Tableau. That's our single source of data. If Planful was better or more comparable in terms of features and functionality, we could probably leverage that in Planful.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We haven't had anything come up that the program has not been able to solve. So, it has been very scalable and flexible.
From a consolidation perspective, it's used within our accounting department. There are probably 10 people who have consolidation reporting access. On the planning side of it, we have probably 70 people to whom we send a template out, and they input their template. So, depending on whether it is consolidation or planning, we have a different user base.
We have deployed it to different parts of our organization, but not all of our organizations' subsidiaries are currently using it. We have our biggest business units deployed and trained on it, but the goal is to get all of our functional areas and all of our business units using it so that we're consolidating and looking at the results in a consistent manner.
How are customer service and support?
Their support is good. Anytime we've had any issues, they've been very responsive and very timely, but the issues have been few and far between.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Our solution was Excel. It was very manual in nature, and we needed to switch.
How was the initial setup?
It was relatively straightforward. We had some stops and starts. They were not because of the technical part of it or interacting with Planful. We just had different things going on in our business, and we had to engage with our implementation team at different times.
It took longer than it should have, but that was because of the things that were going on with us. We're also deploying an ERP system at the same time, and our resources were reallocated. It probably took more than a year to fully implement, but that's because we stopped and started our engagement at different times during the year.
What about the implementation team?
Planful still pretty much uses third parties for the implementation. So, we used a third party that they partner with called Keen Vision. They were our implementation provider. Our experience with them was good.
They just helped us implement it. The maintenance is on us. We probably have one and a half resources updating the consolidation, uploading the files, and doing the reporting. We need one to two people.
We don't have IT supporting this. The accounting department is supporting this. Because we don't have IT support, we do a manual upload into Planful every month. At some point, I'd like to have an automated solution feeding directly from our ERP, but because we're in that new ERP mode, it's still a little bit of a manual process. That's probably the only next step that I'd like to see so that we do not have to upload our data ourselves.
What was our ROI?
In terms of the time that we used to spend reconciling the numbers, we definitely are utilizing our time better.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Right now, everything is on a three-year term contract, and that is our main cost.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did our due diligence, and we looked at different ratings out there. It was between this one and the solution provided by Workday Adaptive Solutions. We did a demo and a walkthrough with both of these providers, and it came down to these two.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise making sure that you have a good understanding of the process that you want and your requirements for heading into it. What we didn't want to do was just replicate our old bad process and automate it in Planful. We tried to have a roadmap of what we wanted it to look like before implementing it so that we just weren't replicating a bad process.
I would rate it an eight out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
