Planning and Budgeting

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting provides finance and business managers with the right information and self-service tools to help them understand the business better, control the planning process, and tune plans to improve results. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is a key component of Oracle Corporate Performance Management, a comprehensive solution for improving performance across all facets of your business. Unlike many solutions that stand apart from your transaction systems and require additional software, hardware, implementation & integration, Oracle Corporate Performance Management is core to the Oracle E-Business Suite – one solution, one data model, one view of your business.

Benefits:

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting provides the following benefits:

Understand Business Better

Planning for your business starts with an in-depth understanding of past performance and business trends, from which you can forecast potential future results. Many organizations struggle to access, aggregate and dissect the information necessary to draw conclusions. Historically, organizations have approached the problem with separate planning systems or spreadsheet-based analysis. However, these solutions are difficult and expensive to maintain. They create silos of stale, incomplete information and lack accurate comparisons of plans, actuals, and forecasts over time. Also, a change in one plan is not reflected in the others. In contrast, Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting provides a unified data model for collecting, analyzing and sharing enterprise information.

Increase Visibility into the Organization

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is built on a unified enterprise data model, utilized across the entire Corporate Performance Management solution, which brings together all types of data, including financial and operational information. The greatest benefit of this cross-enterprise data model is enhanced visibility, consistency of information and a better understanding of your business. For example, by analyzing which customers are buying which products or services you can better understand the appeal of your offerings to various market segments. A second benefit is easier administration. By maintaining a single copy of the information, you can reduce maintenance costs and eliminate latency between copies and extracts. The integrated environment is open to all data sources, including homegrown data warehouses, standard ERP applications, spreadsheets, and legacy or proprietary systems. An additional benefit for Oracle E-Business Suite customers is out-of-the-box integration, which simplifies set-up by sharing hierarchies and segments to dimensional mapping.

Analyze History, Probe Cause and Effect, and Spot Trends

Unable to directly access information, many organizations depend on IT to create new reports or users collect and manipulate data in spreadsheets. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting puts the power in the hands of planners and business managers to access, analyze and forecast on multiple business dimensions. A wizard-like query tool walks you through the selection of dimensions for analysis – such as department, cost type, time frame – calculation types, and graphical options. With a click of a button, a custom multidimensional report is created and through point and click icons, users can rotate the dimensions or drill into more detail. This simple to use tool allows finance and business managers to perform on the fly analysis, explore cause and effect, and perform what-if analysis. Robust annotation functionality captures comments and supports the justification of budgets and forecasts. Reports can be shared with other people in the organization without the risk of violating security rules because Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting will automatically filter the data displayed based on the recipient’s security access.

Provide the Right Information to the Right People at the Right Time

Information overload distracts from primary responsibilities, but by providing the right people with the right information at the right time, the focus can be on improving the business. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting provides business logic built into the application to manage the flow of information, giving people visibility only to the information they need. Metrics can be defined through the use of pre-built templates, such as market share or historical comparisons. These types of analytics can be put together in a series of reports and graphs, which can then be deployed to an enterprise portal, assembled into briefing books, distributed through e-mail, or exported to a set of spreadsheets.

Control Planning Process

The typical planning process takes far too long and the end result is stale by the time it is complete. Due to the lengthy time involved, many companies are unable to re-generate forecasts on a timely basis. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting provides a framework for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and monitoring to decrease the budget cycle and increase the accuracy of forecasts over time. Planners define repeatable and transparent processes to collect, review and approve budgets and forecasts. Systematic process definition and automatic, simplified execution shorten planning and budgeting cycle time. Administration time – to set calendars, distribute worksheets, chase budget submissions, and make notifications for changes to assumptions – is also substantially reduced. Business driver and model definitions are shared across the enterprise, providing consistency, control, and auditability – the cornerstones of good corporate governance. Everyone has visibility into the status of the planning process, including which of their actions or submissions are pending approval, and what is required of decision-makers.

Adjust Processes to Meet Planning Objectives

Within a single enterprise, several levels, time frames and types of planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes are generally required. For example, a high-level five-year plan, involving statistical forecasting and modeling may be needed every other year. A detailed plan, projecting historical information with collaborative data entry, is likely needed every year. Budgets that cascade down the organization, picking up headcount and salary, with targets and approval required at each level may be needed as well. It may also be necessary to generate monthly rolling forecasts. With Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting, you define the data model, the business rules, the tasks and the schedules for as many processes as you need. Once these processes are defined, they can be quickly repeated as frequently as is necessary for your business.

Achieve Consensus When Looking Forward

Many organizations need to support varying planning processes among the business units, and at the same time align all the plans with the central strategy. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting can knit these related processes together, ensuring that drivers set at the corporate or central level are aligned at the business units. Looking holistically at the business facilitates impact analysis of opportunities. As assumptions change in one part of the business they are immediately available across the business with automatic notification, so that the entire organization remains up to date and in accord.

Prepare Plans to Improve Results

In a busy world, managers are often pulled into day-to-day operations and emergencies. Too little time is spent reviewing results and recalibrating strategic plans. As a result, organizations often drift off track or stay focused on goals that are no longer appropriate for the market conditions. While it is important to monitor results on an ongoing basis, so that the plans can be tuned, gathering the data and finding the time to do so can be impossible. With Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting, the tuning processes can be automated and integrated into day-to-day operations as any other business process. For example, a sales analysis process can be set to automatically take the appropriate updates to the pipeline, run an analysis of market share and promotions, update monitoring reports, and alert the users. Automation of the tuning process enables more collaboration and promotes a more agile business.

Hold Team Members Accountable

Integrated into Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting are cross-functional responsibility hierarchies, which trace items within plans and forecasts, even single points of data if required, to the person responsible. For example, alerts can automatically e-mail the manager of an underperforming area and require action, such as an explanation or correction. Data security is vital for such sensitive information, so results are filtered by an individual user. A single report available to many people shows only the data to which the user has access. The right information gets to the right people, so they can be accountable.

Improve Agility

Agility relies on collaboratively adjusting forecasts based on up-to-date information As the actual results come in, forecasts must be tuned to provide a true picture of expected results and incorporate changes to address concerns raised from monitoring activities. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting accelerates revised data entry by automatically preparing worksheets for review and distributing them to the right people, based on responsibility. Using dynamic business calculations, managers can investigate alternative what-if scenarios to determine the right action to take.

Grow Globally

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting allows you to manage organizations across the world. You can report and budget each organization in multiple currencies, translating to the parent currency as you roll up the organizations. The currency translation calculation template allows you to translate historical results using actual exchange rates in effect at the time, but plan future operations using budgeted exchange rates. Emerging markets are often a source of growth for acquisitive companies. Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting includes the ability to strip out the effects of inflation when analyzing results from markets with unstable currencies, and to budget in both local currency and constant currency.

Work Across Enterprise

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is open to data from any application. Built to help you plan and budget in a multi-vendor environment, Oracle provides tools to help you easily access and utilize the vital data you need for planning, regardless of where is it stored.

Oracle E-Business Suite—The Complete Solution

Oracle E-Business Suite enables companies to efficiently manage customer processes, manufacture products, ship orders, collect payments, and more—all from applications that are built on unified information architecture. This information architecture provides a single definition of your customers, suppliers, employees, and products —all aspects of your business. Whether you implement one module or the entire Suite, Oracle E-Business Suite enables you to share unified information across the enterprise so you can make smarter decisions with better information.