BARC survey: Why companies are dissatisfied with their planning

The increasing complexity and dynamics of the business world make it necessary for companies to optimize and modernize their business planning. There seems to be a lot of catching up to do in this area, because many companies are still very dissatisfied with their planning. This is also confirmed by the BARC survey “The future of planning – meeting changing requirements with comprehensive modernization”. In this survey, only 5% of companies state that they currently have no challenges in the areas of planning and forecasting.

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The most common shortcomings in business planning

But what exactly is the problem in business planning? Most frequently, companies complain about insufficient efficiency in planning processes. The manual effort required to prepare and execute business planning is very high, and the corresponding processes are complex. In addition, there are time-consuming coordination rounds. In short, business planning takes too long and ties up too many resources in the company. The quality of the results achieved is disproportionate to the effort involved.

In particular, consolidating the required data from different source systems proves to be time-consuming. This delays the provision of important information. In addition, stakeholders question the quality of the data and complain about the lack of transparency in the planning processes and results. For this reason, there is also a certain distrust of the results. However, if companies cannot rely on the results of their own business planning, they lose a stable foundation for decision-making. On the other hand, if companies can make the right decisions based on relevant and high-quality data in less time, they gain valuable competitive advantages.

What companies want for business planning

To be successful in the long term, the dynamic market environment requires companies to make continuous adjustments to their business development. The prerequisite for this is sound automated forecasts based on high-quality data – brought together from an increasing number of internal and external sources and systems. As the most important measure for optimizing business planning, companies cite the expansion of the scope of planning and forecasting beyond the financial sector through the integration of operational planning (41%). They would also like to see more investment in simulations and scenario analysis (40%). Simulations help to understand alternative courses of action and to evaluate and compare potential developments.

Furthermore, planners would like to see rolling forecasts instead of one-time year-end forecasts (37%), as they require fewer resources than lengthy annual planning. In this way, planning and forecasts are updated more frequently and can adequately take into account the rapid dynamics of the business environment. However, key prerequisites for this approach are comprehensive automation and improved data management.

Conclusion: Modernization of business planning is essential

The volatility of the markets requires an increasingly rapid response capability. Traditional business planning is no longer able to keep pace with the dynamics of the business world. Companies that modernize their business planning with a focus on flexibility and agility create a high-quality basis for decision-making and massively shorten their planning processes. This ensures that business planning is always based on an up-to-date database and that new or changed framework conditions are taken into account to the required extent. The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence makes it possible to gain new insights from the existing data and to derive suitable measures from them.