There’s a famous quote from Mike Tyson that says: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This is often how we feel when we try to make plans for our business. It looks great on paper and everyone thinks that they’ve built in enough margin for error – and then the circumstances change again and you’re back at square one. It can be very frustrating, we know, but there are ways to mitigate this risk and to improve the overall accuracy of your planning endeavours.
The one way that we’re going to focus on today is to integrate your planning – bringing everything under one roof so that your plan is holistic and informed by all the data at your disposal.
The problem with data silos
If you look at most major organizations, they’ve naturally self-segregated into function-specific teams that focus on particular areas of expertise and are rewarded based on performance metrics that make sense in their space. Collaboration across these divisions is challenging and often that is where the core of many problems sits.
The same is true with the data that these teams use. As each silo pushes forward, they are very good at using the data that they have, but they don’t have a fuller picture of what’s happening across the rest of the company. This results in duplicated effort and sub-optimal solutions because they’re optimizing for what is in front of them, without knowing how their decisions impact other departments upstream and downstream.
The natural extension is that any analysis and planning done within the silo is going to be incomplete – and this is where problems can arise. In these silos, specific insights get lost, and then when the business landscape shifts, everyone is left holding on to ideas and beliefs that simply didn’t hold water, to begin with.
Integrated planning is the way forward
The only way to get around this is by integrating your planning function completely. As an organization, you want to pull all your data and insights together into one place so you can map out the interdependencies and make the most of what you have available to you. When you do this effectively, you can create a plan that not only takes into account the various nuances that live and breathe within your company but also that is robust to internal drivers and assumptions that you might not have considered when working in silos.
To achieve this, you’ll need to leverage software solutions that can integrate your various divisions seamlessly and get everyone pulling in the same direction. That’s what we’ve tried to do here at Apliqo – and our offering is built on the foundation of an integrated planning framework. Every aspect of our solutions is built to fit together and when used together, they allow for complex businesses to get to the heart of their planning and analysis – without compromising on quality. It eliminates data silos and can help to breathe fresh air into how you think about planning.
If you’re interested in seeing what a truly integrated plan can do for you, get in touch today. We hope we’ll get the chance to show you just how powerful this idea and implementation can be.
