You know enterprise planning software will make your life easier, but you don’t have buy-in from management — what do you do? Here are some tips for getting the green light.
The "Issue Sell"
Companies thrive when everyone in the organization feels they can speak up, especially highly valuable employees that are acutely aware of day-to-day operations. So, speak up!
Researchers Jane Dutton and Susan Ashford pioneered the concept of “issue selling” decades ago as an effective method to gain buy-in. Outline specific pain points you have witnessed and their impact on overall business goals, involve your peers and their experiences, and don’t forget to anticipate questions that may arise regarding timing of implementation or product capabilities.
Here are some key Oracle Hyperion Planning benefits that can help in this process:
A leader in its class
Technology research firm Gartner recognized Oracle Hyperion as a market leader for the ninth consecutive year in its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Suites. Gartner positions vendors within a particular quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. In this year’s report, among the market leaders, Oracle is positioned with the highest ability to execute and the strongest in completeness of vision.
Key business benefits
- Reduce budgeting and planning cycles by weeks or months
- Improve forecast reliability
- Appeal to a wider user community through an intuitive Web user interface
- Provide familiar user interface for users with full Microsoft Office integration
- Reduce planning cycles with anywhere, anytime mobile
- Eliminate time lag between when plans are updated and reports are refreshed
- Reduce cost of ownership through superior application deployment, management tools, and packaged data integration
- Lay the foundation for making the transition to Enterprise Business Planning
Easing into Oracle Hyperion Planning
We recognize that it may take some work and budget planning to allocate funds for a full-scale planning application. You still have options in the meantime:
- PBCS - Oracle Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) is a SaaS offering for planning, meaning there are no CAPEX infrastructure investment hurdles to overcome. Besides the financial benefit, PBCS requires minimal IT resources, simplifies disconnected spreadsheets with ease, and typically takes only weeks to implement. (Learn more about PBCS versus on-premise Oracle Hyperion Planning.)
- Partial planning application - PBCS does have some limitations in its features and functionality — if this is the case for your environment, our team will often do a requirements gathering session to tackle the biggest issues with just a partial planning implementation. In this scenario, our clients typically get started with something like income statements, and then balance sheet and cash flow applications come later when more budget becomes available.
Regardless of your situation, an expert consulting team can help you and your organization move beyond spreadsheets toward more streamlined and painless financial analysis. 
