What is Superplännen and how can organizations achieve it?
Find out how to tap into the power of a great plan in an interview with Kevin Alansky, Jedox Chief Marketing Officer.
Kevin Alansky, CMO at Jedox
Kevin Alansky, Chief Marketing Officer at Jedox, shares how to create a culture of decisiveness in an enterprise through powerful planning, emphasizing the importance of integrated business planning (IBP), collaboration, and critical software capabilities. Read the conversation below to learn what leaders and teams in every organization should know about optimizing their planning and performance management processes to reach Superplännen – an elevated state of planning.
What does Superplännen mean, and what inspired the concept?
Kevin Alansky: In the push to build a plan, it’s easy to forget you aren’t just plugging in numbers to meet a deadline; you’re telling the story of a business and the people in it. A plan should transcend numbers and serve as a road map to success. When a plan is done right, it instills a culture of decisiveness, improves the ability to serve the changing needs of customers, and boosts profitability. Simply put: a great plan empowers you to shape the future.
Too many organizations around the world have a plan that doesn’t match their actual business model and structure. This is a tremendous drag on accountability and decision-making, and can negatively affect productivity, profitability, and team morale. So why is it so hard to plan according to the way an organization works in the real world? The reason is simple: most organizations use planning and performance management solutions that don’t have the adaptability, integration, or simplicity that teams need to collaborate and succeed.
That’s where Superplännen comes in. Superplännen is a word we created that describes the exhilarating and satisfying feeling of working smarter, collaborating better, being decisive, and hitting the mark. Superplännen is not a product, feature, or technology. It’s when the organization performs the way you envisioned it to perform. When the team achieves the goals they set out to accomplish. When everyone reaps the subsequent rewards of planning accurately for the future.
The inspiration for the Superplännen concept begins with our German roots. Starting with Jedox headquarters in Freiburg, the organization has expanded across the globe in just a few years to become the world’s most adaptable planning and performance management platform. Superplännen celebrates those German roots and articulates the organization’s global mission at the same time.
How can organizations achieve Superplännen?
Kevin Alansky: Organizations can reach this elevated state of planning by making adaptable plans that outperform expectations. Doing that creates a culture of decisiveness, confidence, and performance. IBP solutions, such as Jedox, do this by automating data collection and integrating it into one platform. This helps teams react to changes in real time, prepare for any challenges, and uncover opportunities.
IBP solutions integrate information from people in every department across hundreds of products and channels in hundreds of countries. All of this is possible based on three main software capabilities:
- Modeling any scenario
- Integrating data from any source
- Reflecting the unique structures of complex businesses into simplified plans
When your data is transparent and accessible for everyone in an organization, productive collaboration and decision-making get easier, and teams are empowered to achieve their goals. A great real-life example of this is Fiat, which initially used legacy reporting and Excel for its quarterly forecasts. With Jedox, the carmaker went from what we call “Excel hell” to unified planning and reporting. Sixty users at Fiat from different departments can now access high-quality data in one place. According to the Head of Controlling: “The efficiency increase in planning alone is very impressive! What took several hours before, we now achieve within seconds.”
When the data is transparent and easily accessible for everyone in an organization, productive collaboration and decision-making become easier, and teams become empowered to achieve their goals.
– Kevin Alansky, Jedox CMO
Who can benefit from Superplännen?
Kevin Alansky: Organizations of any size in any industry can reap the benefits of Superplännen. Thousands of companies, from global automotive brands to major retailers and energy suppliers, use Jedox to improve their planning and performance management.
Whether you’re in finance, sales, HR, marketing, or procurement, all teams benefit from having a single source of truth for financial and operational data. This can take the form of any business-critical KPIs, from profit and loss statements to marketing automation and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Every user can respond in real time, knowing the latest strategies and market forces coming into play.
This encourages more collaboration between teams. And when that happens, they can celebrate hitting the mark together more often. That also leads to gratification on an individual level. There’s nothing quite like the exhilaration you get when you achieve what you set out to achieve, and all the pieces fall into place. When individuals, teams, leadership, and boards can all manage performance the way they need to, they can take decisive action, control the trajectory of the business, and achieve greater operational efficiencies and profitability. That is the power of Superplännen.
Which financial planning software capabilities are the most essential?
Kevin Alansky: IBP solutions, such as Jedox, have several critical capabilities that help organizations reach Superplännen. Jedox was ranked in the Gartner 2022 Critical Capabilities report across several use cases, including efficiency, improved operational visibility and management, and complex business environment. It’s a good resource for assessing the best capabilities for your enterprise.
A few essential capabilities include:
- Choosing your model – you have the option to build your own or choose from prebuilt solutions that come with best practices for guidance
- Integrating data from almost any source, including flat files, relational databases, data lakes, and cloud apps
- Creating any set of business logic rules using a no-code formula editor
- Performing ad hoc analysis and quickly showing any changes in your markets in the planning engine
- Integrating with any application your enterprise already has, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, and Oracle
- Using artificial intelligence (AI) to drive insights, predictive forecasting, and decisions
How does Superplännen tie into the company values at Jedox?
Kevin Alansky: Superplännen has been a part of our identity from the beginning. It embodies our #OneTeam mindset, which encourages participation across all teams, functions, and levels so we can achieve our goals, regardless of geography. This is the same type of unification that happens when teams use a single source of truth to collaborate and plan effectively.
Superplännen also ties into one of our other values: having a growth mindset. Each day, we operate with a sense of urgency to grow our business and ourselves as professionals. This helps us stay ahead of the curve and gives us the foresight to respond to any changes. We prioritize getting tasks done better and quicker, and we aren’t bound by legacy processes.
Another key value of ours is producing impactful results. Can you develop a plan and hit the mark? We do this for our customers, our ecosystem, and ourselves by working smarter, collaborating effectively, being decisive, and hitting the mark – the ultimate factor here. We want to continually improve our approach to execute better and faster, and Superplännen drives all of it.
Any closing comments or takeaways?
Kevin Alansky: We believe every organization can achieve Superplännen and experience the decisiveness, confidence, and performance that comes with it, no matter where you are in your digital transformation journey. Planning and performance management solutions that bring adaptability, integration, and simplicity will not only help you get there but empower you to shape the future, regardless of what lies ahead.
