A planning and forecasting solution I would’ve given my right arm

Yes, that’s a click bait title and of course I’m exaggerating (well, since it’s an idiom, I get away with that). Also programming with one arm. No, thank you. 😊

So let’s rephrase this!

What if there would’ve been a product or an IT solution that would have made my and my colleagues work significantly easier, more effective and stress free? Well, now there is.

Yes you guessed it right. I’m an ex financial controller. I few years ago I used to work as a financial controller at large manufacturing companies (among others). What they had in common was that typically a lot of people participated in the planning process. So a large part of the controlling work was spent on coordinating, consolidating, and validating the planning and forecast data.

We used Excel for this. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Most companies do it using Excel even today.

You’re asking: Didn’t these companies have special planning software? Of course they did! However, these software were not designed to enable cooperation between the Hungarian subsidiaries, but rather to provide a unified, predetermined (and limited) format in which the foreign parent company would receive the data related to plans and forecasts. So we were left with Excel and we all – probably including you the reader – know Excel’s limitations when it comes to collaboration.

But wait a minute! What about Excel online? Nope, still not the real thing! Let’s see just a few examples:

• If two users are adding rows at the same time, some of the date just “magically” disappears.
• There is no finished or final form or actually any traceable state for a given time. From this point of view, even an e-mail is better, because there’s at least a certain point in time, after which the person who provided the data is not going to alter or edit it again. In case of an online sheet, this is not a straightforward at all.
• And generally speaking, Excel online does not provide the same quality as the desktop application. At least not yet.

Ok, but why not a develop an in-house custom solution?

At one of the companies I worked for we had a great in-house IT team who developed most of the company’s internal applications, among other things. I had the opportunity to participate in a project during which we tried to develop an internal intranet site that would provide plan and forecast data for the company investments. The team was great and we worked on the project a lot, yet, even a year later, we still couldn’t finish the project. Moreover, since it was strictly an IT “product”, any future changes, even the slightest ones that the controller team would’ve wanted, would need to go through the IT department.

So, what’s so special about Abylo’s Planning and Forecasting solution? What alternative does it offer to the three real life examples described above? Namely: Emailing Excels or working with Excel online, using an external predefined and limited software, or intranet-based/custom-developed web-based software?

• Abylon Rapid Planning is essentially a technology, an option, making it completely flexible for a company. You can create templates that can be freely expanded with new rows or even columns, or you can create templates with a fully connected column and row structure.
• Everybody involved in the process can use their preferred version of Excel (desktop or online).
• You don’t need to worry about data validation during your day-to-day work, Rapid Planning does this for you before loading the data.
• The technology allows for more sophisticated cooperation even in case of multi-layer management (e.g. data validation can be done from professional or content-based standpoint), supporting multi-round approval and email based communication.
• Everyone can just load their own factual data, there’s no need for controlling to manually prepare and validate it before loading.

OK, but still how to imagine this solution? For people with a more visual approach (I’m also one of them) here’s a few screenshots to get a basic understanding:

Basically, users open an Excel Add-in in which they can perform various tasks. Through this Add-in, Rapid Planning technology provides the back-end and database connection based on which the features described above, among others, can be accessed.