Corporate Planner

Overview

Corporate Planner is the number one planning and forecasting tool in Germany. It has been implemented in over 1800 companies in many countries. M4 Systems has been a registered reseller of this product for many years and has the expertise, using modern interface technologies, to integrate this with Microsoft’s ERP solution Dynamics GP. We are able to set up customer-specific models quickly and easily.

Corporate Planner offers similar capability to Hyperion and Cognos, but at a reasonable mid-market price. It's amazingly powerful, yet easy to use for developing budgets and forecasts.

Benefits

Flexibility and Broad Suitability

Corporate Planner is a flexible modeling and control system that can easily be adapted to fit a company’s specific requirements. Its unique "tree structure" gives a graphical snapshot of relationships and allows for easy creation of structures and aids navigation through the system.

It is ideal for many different types of businesses, from distribution, manufacturing to service industries, public and non-profit organisations. The software can be used across all functions of the business: from sales, marketing, operations to finance and general management. Moreover, business consultants and auditors can use the software on behalf of their clients.

Comprehensive Management Tool to Speed Up and Enhance Company Performance

Corporate Planner doesn’t just look at the four integral components of effective management - planning, information, analysis and decisive action - individually, but takes account of all four simultaneously to allow for more integrated analysis and a clearer overview of results. By putting you in the driving seat of your data in real-time Corporate Planner allows you to exercise more timely control in order to improve company results.

Fast and Easy Budgeting

You can make detailed bottom-up adjustments, whilst also making quick top-down plans at higher hierarchy levels to ensure quick and effective budgeting for all enterprise areas.

Corporate Planner features a number of planning tools, including:

• Rolling multi-year planning time spans (2, 5 and 10 years)
• Up to 8 user-defined data streams accessible at one time, e.g. actual values, current budget, alternative plans, forecast, simulation, etc (data can be imported from Dynamics GP or any other ERP system)
• Parameter settings for monitoring variances
• User-defined level of aggregation in any functional area, e.g. major product groups, individual products, etc.
• Generate forecasts based on historical information and seasonal variations
• User-defined weighting factors
• Trend analysis functions
• Goal-seeking algorithm
• Simulations with user-defined time spans and values
• Life-cycle costing
• Investment planning
• Credit planning
• And many more...

Great Analysis: Compare, Contrast and Quickly Understand Company Position and Trends

The software performs a wide range of management analyses in a single click manœuvre, including variance analyses, exception reporting, key ratio analyses (e.g. ROI analysis), time line analyses, 80/20 pareto analyses, budget/actual comparisons and break-even analyses. Variance analyses allow you to pinpoint for example where budgets have been exceeded. The results are presented graphically with full drill-down for easy interrogation and can also be transferred to other systems (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) for ease of presentation at meetings and conferences.

Simulation Capabilities Guiding Robust Decisions

Test the soundness of your decisions under various planning scenarios by using Corporate Planners’ incredible simulation tools. Multiple assumptions can apply, worst-case and best-case scenarios can be applied and simulation values can be combined with existing values. Interdependencies are taken into account (e.g. tax payments increase automatically when simulating a higher turnover).

You can save simulation results or discard them without affecting real data. Affected variables are highlighted differently showing direct and indirect impacts. Simulation results are presented graphically, making comparisons easier and for you to arrive at a clearer understanding of cause/effect relationships.

As a whole, simulations provide a strong basis for making confident decisions. They are always simple and straightforward to use!

Reporting for a Clearer Insight into Your Business

Company data held in the tree structure can be presented in multiple ways: spreadsheets, reports and graphic displays.

The spreadsheet option can show several data streams in comparison (maximum number eight). The time interval can also be set as required. The tree structure is permanently visible making for easier orientation: as you move through the tree hierarchies the spreadsheet is automatically adjusted to reflect current position. Subsidiary fields are added to the spreadsheet by a mouse-click, making it easy to expand the hierarchies.

Data in the tree structure can also be shown graphically with any active field in the tree structure automatically transferred to the graphic display. This presents information in a mode that can be easily grasped and used in presentations and reports. All graphic displays can be saved in the "Graphics store" for later retrieval. Each graph need only be created once and is updated automatically when the set active time span is altered. A graphic drill-down expands the data to provide greater detail. There is a choice of graphic styles.

The Report Manager empowers you to create your own individual reporting system. Reports are adjusted automatically whenever the time span is modified, implying that each report only needs to be created once and thereafter accessed and updated by simply selecting the required time span. Reports can be disseminated in a variety of formats and means: as XML, as html for the intranet/extranet, as pdf for e-mailing to specially set-up report groups or simply exported to MS-Office products (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). There are a large number of report templates in the system ready for use, but custom and ad-hoc reports (such as your own monthly statements, financial plans and balances) are in fact quickly and easily created.

To make it easy to create your own, there is a drag and drop function, there is unlimited choice of layout to include company logos, customisable colours and fonts. Warning colours can be used to highlight variances and so on.

The Controlling Report is an additional facility for creating extensive reports which include graphics and analysis results. Corporate Planner exports whatever data are required (including individual values and entire analyses and key ratios) to Word at the touch of a button. Periodical reports are updated in next to no time.

ERP (Dynamics GP) Integration

Corporate Planner is open to all data and permits import from various pre-systems, such as financial accounting, cost accounting and merchandise information systems. As mentioned in the Overview, M4 Systems have developed a convenient bi-directional integration with Microsoft’s ERP solution "Dynamics GP", such that not only can data and entire structures be imported to Corporate Planner, but planning data can also be written back to the pre-system as well as drill-downs being performed from Corporate Planner back down to the original journal entry in the pre-system.

Once data has been imported there is no further need to re-import: import setting can be used over and over again, whereby data imports can be scheduled to run automatically, say overnight, for minimal disruption.

Data can be exported to other non-ERP applications, such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint, and in different formats, e.g. html or XML or saved to pdf format for e-mail distribution.

Special Features

Tree Structure

The easy to navigate tree structure is the most important element in Corporate Planner and forms the basis of all analyses and evaluations within the system. The tree structure can be individually designed, re-arranged and annotated quickly, easily and without programming knowledge.

With the tree configuration you can define structures for

• Dynamically linked P&L, balance sheets, cash flow forecasts
• Subsidiaries, profit or cost centres
• Different views of data, e.g. by product, region, sales hierarchy, etc.
• Profit or margin calculations
• Personnel numbers and costs
• And much, much more...

Boss-Box

With a mouse-click the Boss-Box makes available the most important and up to date information in a variety of formats (reports, evaluations, analyses). It’s an easy to use call-up system to retrieve vital, real-time data (such as current cash flow or an overview of key ratios) just when you need it and for important meetings.

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