What it is

Infor CPM Planning and Budgeting helps you quickly set high level plan targets, develop detailed driver-based operational and financial plans, and collect and manage the budget and forecast information required to achieve your planned objectives.

What it does

Infor CPM Planning and Budgeting makes it easier for companies like yours to improve performance by streamlining planning, budgeting, and forecasting business processes and reducing the extra hours it takes to create and execute those plans. CPM Planning and Budgeting draws on the information you have across your organization and around the world at the level of detail you require.

It helps companies improve every aspect of the planning, budgeting, and forecasting process, including:

• Budgeting more effectively—Document the budgeting process, educate system users across the organization, monitor company-wide budget submissions and approvals from anywhere at any time, and enforce budget rules and timelines. The central communication portal, guided workflow capabilities, electronic budget submission and approval process, and automated exception alerts are just some of the tools that will help you gain control over this process.
• Planning more effectively—Model your business quickly and test multiple scenarios easily, so you can prepare realistic financial and operational plans that help your organization achieve its goals. Driver-based modeling helps your company define its business success factors, key contributors to those factors, and then plan them in detail providing a roadmap to improved performance.
• Testing "what if" scenarios—Comprehensively model your business and perform real-time "what if" scenario planning. You can change a business assumption, and watch as the software automatically recalculates the entire model for you, freeing you to concentrate on the actual plan instead of the math. With this solution, you can build in calculations, allocations, phasing, market factors, seasonality, and more.
• Ensuring realistic results with forecasting—Let the calculation engine select the optimum method for data analysis, and create benchmarks to test the likely accuracy of employee-submitted forecasts, ultimately reducing forecast game-playing. You can also use this objective forecast to jump-start your planning and budgeting process. Forecasting lets you predict not only at a summary level, but also at a detailed level, such as product line, region, or sales channel.
• Adjusting actions to achieve goals—Shift planning away from less accurate historical budgeting and forecasting, and move toward continuous predictive modeling and rolling forecast models-automatically adjusting the revenue targets to meet your goals as each period closes and a new period rolls forward.

What it means

CPM Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting helps you:

• Improve the quality and speed of your planning process.
• Increase the speed of your budgeting process and the relevance of your budget.
• Prepare forecasts faster, with greater insight and accuracy.
• Ensure realistic results and improved performance when plans, budgets, and forecasts all work seamlessly with each other.
• Account for one-time or unusual events that can skew results and plans.
• Generate effective plans without statistical expertise.