Adaptive Planning, which specialises in on-demand financial planning and reporting solutions for companies of all sizes, has announced a new product release that incorporates multi-dimensional planning features and integration with NetSuite
With version 6.0, Adaptive Planning says it is expanding upon the solution’s feature set through the introduction of new Cube Sheet functionality, providing multi-dimensional planning capabilities that it says were previously only available in expensive enterprise applications requiring significant IT skills. The new version also features integration with NetSuite, allowing customers of both solutions to connect, share data, and navigate between applications, including drilling through from Adaptive Planning into underlying transactions within NetSuite.
In conjunction with the release of version 6.0, Adaptive Planning is also introducing a new benchmarking initiative, consisting of a Client Benchmarking Service and an Industry Trends module, which will enable companies to quickly and easily compare their financial and operational performance metrics against those of their industry peers.
"Adaptive Planning 6.0 represents a major milestone for us, as we continue to incorporate new innovations and high-end features into an easy-to-use and affordable package," said William A. Soward, CEO of Adaptive Planning. "With 6.0, we are making it simple for business users without IT skills to create and use sophisticated multi-dimensional financial planning models and to establish seamless integration with NetSuite. These new capabilities, together with our breakthrough benchmarking offerings, give companies access to comprehensive, customised, real-time information that supports more accurate planning, better management reporting and analysis, and more agile decision making."
The new Cube Sheet feature allows business users to easily create and use financial models with up to ten dimensions, simplifying the planning of large volumes of data. For example, sales executives and product managers often need to plan and re-forecast revenues by making volume and price assumptions for multiple geographies, product lines, customers, product SKUs, time periods, and other dimensions -- a planning exercise that requires the input and ongoing review of millions of discrete data elements.
"As a telecommunications solutions provider, we plan multiple revenue streams, including product, installation, and maintenance revenues nationwide," said Gwyn Goodrow, Director, FP&A and Payroll, Shared Technologies Inc., an Adaptive Planning customer. "The new Cube Sheet functionality will allow our organization to plan and manage our business in greater detail, resulting in improved profitability analysis which may ultimately result in better overall business performance."
The NetSuite integration in Adaptive Planning 6.0 allows companies to connect the two applications, map dimensions and accounts, import and export actual and plan information, and seamlessly navigate between the solutions -- all in a matter of minutes. Users can identify plan versus actual variances in Adaptive Planning reports, isolate the organisation and account responsible for the variance, and drill through into NetSuite to view the actual transactions underlying the variance.
Because this is a vendor-developed product feature, the integration will be updated and maintained across future releases -- unlike the case with some third-party solutions, no additional maintenance work will be required by customers says the company.
As announced on June 10, 2009, NetSuite will utilize the Adaptive Planning solution and new integration capabilities for the NetSuite Financial Planning module it will make available to its current and new customers in Q3 2009.
