leader who wants to “bring it all together” and create an actionable vision and plan for improving readiness and performance. The book is also intended for managers who want to understand Connected Planning and how it can help them be better managers. My hope is that any student of planning and forecasting can learn and apply at least a few ideas from this book.
Connected Planning is essentially about three things to help you improve your management operating system:
1 A Framework. This is the management operating system for your business and shows how all of the pieces of Connected Planning work together as one holistic process. It is most useful as a long-term, high-level Connected Planning vision.
2 Enabling Technologies. Within the framework, I show what pieces you need to put into place to deliver on the necessary planning processes and how to connect them.
3 A Fresh Planning Roadmap. This is insight on how to prioritize all those potential planning and forecasting initiatives given your strategic business objectives, and how they are supported by enabling technologies, eventually being fulfilled on your aspirational Connected Planning framework.
Overview of the Content
The book is organized into 11 chapters:
Chapter 1: What's Broken and What's Possible? This chapter gives you an overview of the promise of Connected Planning. It helps you understand what problems this domain was created to solve and how well it's been solving them.
Chapter 2: Connected Planning. A new chapter in the second edition that gives an overview of Connected Planning, the components, and other definitions that help readers navigate the rest of the book.
Chapter 3: A Planning Operating System. This is the central framework of the book and of the model for Connected Planning as a process. Each of the cornerstones of the process are explored in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 4: Debate: What Can We Do and What Should We Do? One of the most overlooked cornerstones of Connected Planning, modeling “what if” scenarios, is the topic of this chapter. Enabling a robust, fact-based, open debate in the company helps it prepare for a variety of possible futures and helps it maximize the value of its assets and minimize risk.
Chapter 5: Commit: Who Will Deliver What, by When? There's more to Connected Planning than only planning. This chapter describes some better practices and shows how planning should be connected to the other areas of the management operating system.
Chapter 6: Visualize: Where Are We, Right Now? One of the most common needs of Connected Planning is variance reporting. It helps answer the question “where are we and how are we doing?” at a point in time. This chapter outlines how reporting and visualization has changed to be much more dynamic, how it must deliver more insight than ever, and how it cannot live in isolation from the planning process.
Chapter 7: Understand: Why Did We Get the Results We Got? Connected Planning as a process not only helps set targets, it also helps explore and understand why you met, exceeded, or missed those targets. This chapter explores approaches to understanding results through business questions and includes the ideas behind “Big Data” and predictive analytics.
Chapter 8: Execute: From Insights to Actions to Results. Chapter 8 is a collection of Connected Planning use cases across a variety of business functions, including Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain, and Human Resources, and processes like order-to-cash. From this chapter you see how Connected Planning can be applied to any area of the business . . . not just Finance.
Chapter 9: Strategy: Everyone Aligned to the Right Outcomes. Connected Planning works when it's aligned with and in support of an organization's strategic objectives. Chapter 9 covers several topics on aligning connected planning to strategy including the ever-popular Profitability Management.
Chapter 10: Digital Planning. A new chapter in this edition, Chapter 10 gives an overview of newer digital technologies that can surround and improve Connected Planning ecosystems.
Chapter 11: Bringing It All Together. Chapter 11 is all about developing your next-generation planning roadmap based on the concepts and practices discussed in this book. It helps you sell Connected Planning internally, ties up a few loose ends, and addresses what it takes to become world class in Connected Planning adoption.
So What?
Typically, budgeting, planning, and forecasting are thought of as solely Finance or Information Technology initiatives and can easily be put in the “operational efficiency through automation” bucket of benefits. Which is just a fancy way of saying a corporate cost-cutting program. However, in order for Connected Planning to really matter in the business, it has to have a direct impact on more than just operating margins. Ideally, it should provide your department, business unit, and company with one or more competitive advantages in the areas of:
Customer acquisition and retention
Product innovation and profitability
People productivity
Supply-chain efficiency
Marketing effectiveness
Overall sustainable execution of strategy
It is no longer an IT-led area but rather a joint IT, Finance, and Business concern that impacts all of these performance areas.
Revenue Growth
One of the first areas of the business to look at for financial performance and competitive advantage is revenue growth. There are a variety of ways that Connected Planning can improve revenue growth, including:
Better focus on sales productivity through more relevant, expedient sales forecasting
Better sales velocity by focusing efforts on the best-selling products, bundles, and channels
Maximized revenue by modeling product, bundle, and channel price mixes
Operating Margin
Especially in a down economy, with the automatic reaction to cut costs, Connected Planning can help ensure you cut the “right” costs and that
