Market Perspectives

Power ON is software designed for organizations to streamline their business planning, budgeting, forecasting, reviewing and reporting, in order to make these processes more effective and accurate. Organizations do a lot of planning: In addition to the budget, they plan headcount, sales, production and their supply chain, as well as other business functions, and traditionally execute this using spreadsheets as they are a familiar tool. However, spreadsheets make it difficult for individuals to plan, especially those in operational roles, and combining a set of spreadsheet-based plans and budgets into an enterprise-wide whole is time consuming and error prone. Power ON addresses the shortcomings of spreadsheet budgeting and planning by enabling executives and managers to work interactively with their models while examining and analyzing historical financial and operational data to better inform their planning decisions. It is designed to streamline planning and budgeting to enable more agile and connected planning. When departments share a common platform, it provides holistic data and analytics so that finance executives can have a comprehensive picture of where the company stands in real time.

Power ON’s recently introduced collaboration, planning and commenting feature enhances Microsoft Power BI users’ ability to comment on data within visualizations and save changes to data (write-back) as it is being created. The new feature allows business heads and decision makers the chance to provide insights and ask questions throughout the planning, budgeting and forecasting process. This improves communication between departments and across different offices, enhancing collaboration. Users can update any numbering in a pivot table without having to first spend time finding the source, as well as add comments to data points throughout the task, alleviating time consuming errors and increasing overall transparency.

Power ON’s capabilities allow finance professionals to play a more strategic role in the organization by providing executives and managers with information faster to alert them to issues and opportunities sooner. The platform offers users a way to plan and forecast directly in their enterprise Microsoft Power BI platform by aligning data collection, planning and reporting all in one. This alleviates manual processes, reduces user error and cuts down on the time it takes to combine data from multiple systems.

Organizations and finance professionals have the option to choose between using Power ON with Excel or Microsoft Power BI. Either program uses the same data in a preset data model that has been created for the user. Additionally, Power ON also has mobile capabilities that allow users to capture data on the go which promotes speed and accuracy for reporting purposes. Power ON also offers built-in connections to 200 different data sources, making the implementation process straightforward ultimately reducing time and cost.

Power ON offers an accessible and lower cost option for what Ventana Research calls continuous planning, especially for organizations that have finance and business analysts with strong Power BI skills. Using the right technology for planning, budgeting and forecasting improves productivity, shortens planning cycle time to enhance agility and improves accuracy. We recommend that any organization wanting to streamline and improve the business value of their operational and financial planning should consider Power ON.