SoftLayer has achieved significant benefits by replacing their legacy budgeting and planning software with the Alight Planning solution. The full story was featured in a webinar earlier this month with the Institute of Management Accountants entitled: Case Study: Measuring the ROI of Planning Software. [Read more…]

Alight Planning, developers of the first solution to make driver-based planning easy, today announced the immediate availability of a new methodology for quantifying the return-on-investment (ROI) of implementing a dedicated budgeting and planning solution.

“This industry needs an ROI calculator, something tangible that finance teams can use to measure the effectiveness of their planning systems,” said Rand Heer, Alight Planning’s CEO. “I outline a framework for getting a handle on the ROI in my article How Agile is your Planning which was featured in a recent issue of Strategic Finance Magazine.” [Read more…]

Alight Planning announced the surprising results of an informal survey conducted during the closing presentation of the GMI-Solutions FP&A training conference in San Francisco held earlier in February. Ben Lamorte, VP Marketing at Alight, introduced new material in his presentation entitled Financial Planning Innovations: Is it worth it to replace spreadsheets with a planning tool?

“Midway through my presentation,” said Lamorte, “I asked the group of about 50 attendees whether their management is prioritizing ‘streamlining existing processes to save time’, Type 1 benefits, or ‘introducing new processes that add business value’, Type 2 benefits. Earlier in the conference I spoke with one FP&A professional who reported, ‘We’re working on the hard benefits which can be measured by time saved; we’re also interested in soft benefits that cannot be measured such as improving decision making.’ This inspired me to conduct an informal survey of the audience about what type of benefits are most important to management. The surprising part was that every single attendee reported management prioritizes Type 2 over Type 1.” [Read more…]

Alight Planning announced that 2011 was the strongest year in the company’s history. The company nearly doubled its employee base to reflect a focus on industry-specific solutions, partner development, and the growing demand for planning that adds value throughout the year. Alight Planning posted significant revenue growth and introduced The Planning Maturity Curve, a framework for measuring the ROI of financial planning activities. [Read more…]

Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning software and the Planning Maturity Curve, today announced a strategic alliance with Proformative, the resource for corporate finance, accounting, and treasury. Proformative members will have expanded access to Alight’s resources in 2012 including best practices for Agile Planning which is quickly becoming the most important activity for Finance teams in the 21st century. [Read more…]