5/08/13 – Most finance professionals have at some stage been involved in the implementation of a finance system – ERP, Budgeting and Forecasting, Consolidation, Reporting, Business Intelligence or data warehousing – and in most cases it will have taken months or years to complete. With the new breed of applications that have been released over the past decade, such as Adaptive Planning, implementation time frames are being drastically reduced.
At GK Horizons we are often met with disbelief when we submit a proposal for implementing Adaptive Planning in 3 weeks. So how can a budgeting and forecasting system be implemented in as little as 3 weeks?
No Hardware: Firstly, there is no hardware to procure and install. Lead times on hardware supply have reduced significantly over the years but when purchasing an on-premise application the hardware procurement process must still be followed. The purchase decision, issuing the order, receiving the order and implementing the hardware all take time that is not required when using a cloud based budgeting and forecasting solution.
No Software: In addition to no hardware, there is no software to install. This alone saves several weeks when compared to the large on-premise EPM application. Hyperion Planning is often quoted as 3-5 days per environment to install. At least 3 environments are required (due to the large amount of coding and scripting requiring migration and testing) saving up to 15 days effort.
No Coding: The absence of coding and scripting is the single largest item saving effort and cost during the implementation. Custom coding requires coding standards to be set, technical documentation to be developed, version control, thorough unit, system, performance and regression testing and in most cases peer reviews of the code. Taking this out of the project entirely will save many months of effort and cost, and reduce the overall risk of the implementation project.
Single Environment: As there is no coding or scripting, Adaptive Planning requires only a single environment. This eliminates configuration migration, configuration management, release management and migration testing. This again saves many weeks of implementation effort required for the on-premise EPM solutions and reduces the project risk.
In a 3 week period GK Horizons (a Sydney based Adaptive Planning partner operating in A/NZ) can complete an implementation of Adaptive Planning (budgeting and forecasting software) with the following scope;
