Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) is a subscription-based planning and budgeting solution built for and deployed on Oracle Cloud. An application of Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite and based on Hyperion Planning, PBCS has enabled organizations of various sizes to quickly adopt world-class planning and budgeting applications with no CAPEX infrastructure investments. It offers immediate value and greater productivity for business planners, analysts, modelers, and decision-makers across all lines of business within an enterprise. PBCS is designed to scale and perform with flexible and customizable deployment options and virtually no learning curve.
Key Features of PBCS
Oracle PBCS provides freedom of choice to deploy a solution that meets specific needs. Clients can either leverage the out-of-the-box, best-in-class planning frameworks or build a focused customized solution that is tailored to an explicit use case. The best practice planning modules are designed to be up and running with minimal effort and are easy to maintain as business planning needs evolve. The modules can also be used by both finance and operational planners and either deployed in their entirety or combined with existing processes to quickly deliver value to the planning process.
Some key features of the modules within PBCS are as follows:
- Financials – Fully integrated financial statement planning across the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows.
- Strategy – Create long-range forecast models using built-in sophisticated scenario modeling capabilities. Perform side-by-side financial and operational analysis of numerous business scenarios and easily change assumptions. Utilized by both Corporate Finance, as well as users in the business units.
- Workforce – Address planning needs related to employees across the enterprise. Easily plan for compensation spend by employee and integrate with Human Capital Management (HCM) systems for a complete solution to manage employee budgets, skills and talent.
- Projects – Financial planning for project-oriented industries and departments (e.g. IT, Marketing, R&D, etc.). Allows for granular planning of employees, contractors, materials, and costs associated with large scale projects.
- Capital – Address planning needs associated with new and existing assets, as well as intangibles. Accounts for long-range, asset-related impacts across the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows. Appropriate for enterprises that have significant capital assets.
Benefits of PBCS
Oracle PBCS is one of the most robust, cloud-based planning and budgeting solutions on the market. It has been used by many large, medium and small companies worldwide to solve enterprise-wide business planning use cases. There are several benefits of implementing PBCS:
- Integrated Planning and Budgeting Process – Planning and budgeting in most organizations tends to collaborate typically using spreadsheets being exchanged between and within operations, lines of business, and finance teams. PBCS facilitates the enterprise- and departmental-level planning process by providing both Excel-based and web-based modeling, planning and approval capabilities within a collaborative scalable solution. Sales, operational and strategic plans can be linked to long-term and near-term financial plans.
- Robust Modeling and Predictive Analytics – Companies today are faced with a rapidly changing business environment. Demand is volatile, costs fluctuate, and the supplier landscape is constantly changing. A key requirement to stay ahead of the competition is to understand the volatility and model for these financial and operational changes quickly based on fast changing assumptions. PBCS provides sophisticated modeling and predictive analytical capabilities that allow users to create multiple what-if versions and slice and dice data based on various assumptions.
- Microsoft Office Integration – PBCS offers comprehensive integration with Microsoft tools such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint using capabilities of Smart View for Office add-in. Users can use Excel as their modeling environment and slice and dice data using Excel based ad hoc analysis. Common planning actions, such as spreading and allocation, are available within data grids. Additionally, users can directly integrate data from PBCS into Word and PowerPoint to create reports. This allows the creation of highly customized documents and presentations with accurate information and users can automatically refresh the report when the underlying data changes. The end result is reduced manual intervention, improved data integrity and increased reporting accuracy.
- Seamless Planning and Management Reporting – Reports and dashboards that display plan, forecast and actual data can be created quickly, and any changes made to the plans in PBCS are instantaneously reflected in the content of the reports and dashboards. Using the web interface, users can access dashboards, interactive analytics and richly formatted financial reports while interacting with the planning system.
- Low Cost and Quick Implementation – Since PBCS is maintained in the Cloud, data centers or cloud servers where PBCS is hosted are owned by Oracle. This eliminates the need for any CAPEX infrastructure investments. Additionally, software versions are always up to date and maintained by Oracle, allowing clients access to the latest and greatest version without requiring any downtime to upgrade. As PBCS removes infrastructure barriers and doesn’t require any onsite hardware or software, businesses of any size can quickly implement the planning and budgeting solution.
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