Planning in a complex business environment is an extraordinary challenge often managed by spreadsheets and heavy manual labour. Teams create plans for future time periods, merge them to present an aggregated view to management, then split changes from management back to the detailed worksheets. Such processes require a high degree of manual data copying and pasting, resulting in a high degree of risk for data errors, which in turn threaten the accuracy and reliability of business plans. Keeping business plans in a clean state in spreadsheets is extremely labour intensive exercise with high reliance on the skills of the individuals maintaining those spreadsheets. Our cloud-based solution offers an intuitive, fast, integrated and collaborative platform for managing, executing and controlling your business plans both into the future and for periods already in the past. Contact us for a guided demo today!
Challenges answered
- Do you have a problem with the transparency of your planning process?
- Is it fast and efficient enough?
- Do you have a problem differentiating between roles and tasks?
- Does it take a lot of effort to make sure that everyone is working with the same or correct numbers?
- Is the cost of your current planning process is too rigid or high and cannot be tailored for your needs?
Benefits
- In our cloud platform, information is stored and represented based on the multidimensional framework which enables the business to manage data in the hierarchical structure.
- All the essential functions are easily and quickly accessible
- The easy-to-use financial planning templates provide the most effective tool for retailers to create high-level and low-level, detailed financial plans efficiently and in a short time.
- Thanks to the built-in wizard’s support, creating workbooks and worksheets does not require any IT knowledge from the user, and the simple and user-friendly interface also helps with quick user adoption.
- This solution is planned to support the retail strategy and lower the overall total cost of ownership.
Key features
- Multidimensional Database- The data is stored and accessed through a multidimensional database (an editable pivot table) and provides the possibility to aggregate data or spread data entered on a higher level.
- Users can work with separated branch of data to support and assist them in an effective and rapid collaborative workflow.
- More than one plan can be created by a user.
- Multi-role management is pre-configured for different user roles.
- Different set of screens are tailored for different roles, creating a more efficient experience for the user.
- Data can be displayed at various level of the hierarchy, if needed simultaneously, and displayed levels can be easily changed
- Templates contain indicators and KPI-s that support plan creation and maximise sales and profit
- Built in wizards help users to create workbooks for displaying and manipulating data effectively
- Users can easily customise their workbooks, manage KPIs, dimensions and filters.
- Disaster recovery service is provided by the platform.
- On demand high availability is standard part of the solution.
- Cloud based platform eliminates costly and lengthy implementations, easy to configure APIs ensure fast and reliable data integration.
Solution Overview
In retail and any other business, planning is one of the most important and complex processes. It typically involves a complex set of activities that need to be followed as part of a workflow by the entire team working on plans jointly. Businesses set strategic merchandise and financial goals that guide the decision-making process of each department and develop financial plans down to the store and item level.
Blue Sky’s Planning Tool supports creating and developing trading plans, analyzing customer behaviors, applying flexible and easy-to-use retail planning solution templates both pre-season and in-season.
Get in Touch
For further information or demo, please contact us.