Connected Planning, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 2Connected Planning

Everybody has a plan 'til they get punched in the face.

—MIKE TYSON

When I started working with FP&A (Financial Planning and Analytics) teams in Canada and the United States, around the mid-1990s, it was called Budgeting. It was usually the annual budget of what a business unit or department could spend, and what their anticipated revenue was. It was a monthly look, at a summarized level, of what an organization thought its income statement was going to be at the end of the year. Of course, it was out-of-date about a month after it was published. Later, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, operational planning was going on throughout the supply chain function, including demand planning and IBP (Integrated Business Planning), which matched demand with capacity and supply. A more sophisticated version of that was called S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning). When companies talked about IBP, it was said, as the acronym implied, as if the business plans were all integrated. Yet there were, and still are, all sorts of other strategic, financial, and operational planning taking place in every business function at all layers of the organization chart. There needed to be a new term to capture the totality of all planning, forecasting, and what-if modeling going on across the enterprise.

I first heard the term Connected Planning when working with Doug Smith and the team at Anaplan. Doug, one of the co-founders of Anaplan, was a visionary technologist and ...