Revenue & Margin Planning

Steelwedge Revenue & Margin Planning solution enables finance executives to have automatic visibility into revenue and margin from an operations plan at various levels of detail, evaluate the impact of a change to Average Selling Price (ASP) or product mix on revenue and margins and provide an infrastructure to create, own and communicate transparent budget, expense and financial plans.

Challenges

The financial plan (with pro-forma income statement), budgets and operations plan are normally created at different times and with different assumptions and quickly fall out-of-sync. This makes it difficult for the finance organization to predict and proactively drive plans to address potential shortfalls in revenue and margins in a timely manner. In a CFO's wish list, the finance organization should be able to drive pro-forma income statement from an operations plan in real-time and use it to forecast gap between the financial plan and the likely outcome from the operations plan.

Today, the finance organization finds it impossible to quickly evaluate the revenue and margin impact of an ASP or product mix change. As a result, it becomes very difficult to easily evaluate various tradeoff scenarios during the sales and operations planning process to select one that meets the revenue, margin, and delivery date and capacity constraints.

Finally, the spreadsheets leave no audit trail of changes to the plans - a necessity in the era of compliance.

Capabilities

• Enterprise-Enabled Excel
• Leverages Excel as a user interface to the planning application
• Audit trail of changes to any data in any spreadsheet cell
• Templates for budgeting, P&L, margin trends and comparison with operational plans and sales or revenue forecasting
• One Plan of Record for the Enterprise with cross-functional visibility
• Common assumptions
• Conversion of unit plans to dollars, and vice versa
• Enables budget planning and other plans to be viewed at the same business hierarchy level
• Automated allocation of overhead to departments, products etc
• Budgeting forecasting software with dashboards for plan/budget to actual comparisons
• Conversion of unit plans to dollars, and vice versa
• Drill-down and aggregation by customer, product family, region, department, profit center, etc
• Scenario and what-if analysis
• Reporting and analysis
• Waterfall and root-cause analysis
• Performance analysis
• Real-time exception alerts

Results

Using Steelwedge, customers can achieve:

• Improved accuracy in revenue and margin projections
• More proactive management of important financial decisions affecting margin and revenue
• Shorter planning cycles - improved agility to update plans when market conditions change
• Improved performance tracking and documentation
• Unified planning process for collaborative budgeting and demand/operations planning
• Budgeting, Financial Plans and Operations plans in sync - see screen shot below.
• Accountability, transparency and compliance