Everyone needs access to consumable data for useful insights
IBM Planning Analytics with Watson – Use Cases
Data is needed for making business decisions. In today’s fast-moving world, it is not just decision
makers, data scientists or IT that require access to data. From Sales to Operations, Finance to
Marketing, everyone needs access to consumable data for useful insights.
With an integrated planning approach, everyone contributes to creating a future ready enterprise.
IBM Planning Analytics with Watson provides one platform for all. In this blog we look at the how
IBM Planning Analytics with Watson can be used to create timely, reliable, agile plans, budgets and
forecasts across an organization.
Finance
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) teams can improve the accuracy and reliability of their
financial plans and forecasts using IBM Planning Analytics for Watson. It enables them to focus on
higher-value work by providing deep insights into business drivers, forecasting multiple scenarios
and generating predictive insights to adjust plans and forecasts easily.
- Deliver dynamic, reliable plans, budgets and forecasts with speed.
- Easily adjust plans as the market changes.
- Gain new insights into the drivers of revenue, profit and cash flow by evaluating the performance of products, customers, channels and model changes.
- Align financial plans with operational plans, linking strategic goals with operational performance and execution.
Operations
The challenge for supply chain leaders is to reduce costs and improve margins. As demand volatility
rises, they require real-time visibility to data. With IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, it’s easy to
create and adjust plans as needed by leveraging deep insights to understand what is driving demand
and your business. It aids organizations in building synchronized, agile and resilient supply chains
with an integrated planning process.
- Unify business unit planning, leverage real-time insights and make better-informed decisions
to maximize profitability. - Identify trends, spot variances, and leverage external data and predictive insights to
understand what is driving demand and create more accurate demand forecasts. - Create accurate and agile inventory and capacity plans to consistently and efficiently meet
demand, avoiding shortages and stockouts.
Sales
Sales teams often depend on time-consuming spreadsheets to strategize and build forecasts. This
process often relies on inaccurate data. IBM Planning Analytics with Watson enables sales teams to
deliver comprehensive analytics, greater forecast accuracy, growth in top-line revenue and shorter
sales cycles. It allows them to track and analyze sales performance in real-time and optimize
resources to increase sales, enhance productivity and drive more top-line revenue.
- Use historical and current sales performance, along with predictive analytics, to forecast
future sales results more accurately. - Design fair and equitable sales territories that are managed for complete coverage, and
create data-driven sales quota targets that incorporate historical sales performance, market
opportunity, and account segmentations. - Optimize sales capacity and resource requirements to ensure complete coverage in all
territories, eliminate the risk of unassigned quotas, and attain revenue goals.
HR
Workforce demands can change quickly. In order to react to such changes HR needs to data from
across the entire enterprise to understand its workforce capacity and future needs. IBM Planning
Analytics with Watson allows businesses to automate manual processes for more reliable decision
making. This high performance, integrated planning tool allows organizations to align departmental
staffing needs with organizational objectives.
- Ensure accurate, comprehensive visibility into your workforce capacity and headcount
planning by unifying all of your data. - Make sure your compensation plan is competitive and aligns with corporate objectives,
talent acquisition and retention. - See the impact of merit increases and promotions before you implement them with what-if
scenario modeling. - Skills development is crucial to workforce longevity and success. Skills can be tracked and
measured to ensure ROI can be provided to justify such programs.
Marketing
IBM Planning Analytics with Watson accelerates marketing planning and allows marketers to pivot in
real time to adjust plans, campaigns and tactics. It enables marketing to create models that predict
potential ROI. With IBM Planning with Watson, you can identify trends and better understand what
is driving customer demand and campaign performance.
- Ensure visibility into your marketing spend and allocate and reallocate resources based on
performance or demand. Track results and compare budget to actual spending. - Create more accurate revenue plans and forecasts based on historical sales data, marketing
performance metrics and predictive analytics. - Track and analyze campaigns in real time to understand performance against targets and
make ongoing adjustments. - Perform deep granular analysis to understand buying behaviors and customer churn.
IT
In order to respond to changing demands IT teams need to be integrated with the rest of the
business. With IBM Planning Analytics with Watson a single centralized plan provides visibility into
resource allocation, spend and asset utilization data. It enables the alignment of departmental and
organizational goals and ultimately the ability to make better strategic decisions.
- Track and manage resources, skills, project status and costs with comprehensive project
plans. Leverage insights into asset and resource utilization to optimize spend. Focus on
projects that maximize value and deliver ROI. - Provide visibility into all data sources to help forecast spend more accurately and prioritize IT
projects. - Cross-functional collaboration coupled with granular insights into IT portfolio data enables
better decision making. Refocus time spent collecting data to strategic planning, helping
align IT with organizational objectives.
Use IBM Planning Analytics with Watson to gain visibility to real time data with direct connectivity to
source data. It allows all users to see the same data and therefore trust in one version of the
truth. One of the key benefits of IBM Planning Analytics with Watson is that it provides a single
planning application for use across all departments, thus enabling alignment and fostering
continuous collaboration capabilities. Join our IBM Analytics 101 Webinar to find out more: