Longview Planning: Features and Benefits

Longview 7 enables you to plan collaboratively and to anticipate and drive results.

• Integrated Workflow Functionality
Longview 7 simplifies collaboration by tracking information as it flows through your organization, empowering administrators to monitor and report on the status of the plan, and enabling users in departments across a global organization to participate in the planning and budgeting process. Workflow management within Longview 7 helps easily communicate data outliers and identify process bottlenecks, issuing email alerts to stakeholders throughout the process, reducing the overall planning cycle time, and providing more accountability, ownership, and control.
• Patterns, Spreads, and Allocations
Longview 7 expedites and simplifies the planning process by providing easy-to-use capabilities for creating your plan, budget, or forecast. Defining information based on different time periods, calculating percentage or dollar increases or decreases, allocating values based on seasonal patterns, and entering commentary at any level of detail are just a few of the features that Longview 7 provides to assist you in the process. These capabilities, in one single integrated application, dramatically speed up your planning process on a foundation of financial integrity.
• Complex Modeling
An essential element of your planning process is the ability to model the business rules that will drive you to achieve your strategic goals. Longview 7 delivers the ability to define your unique business rules and calculations, from the simple to the complex. For example, users may specify the desired goal for virtually any aspect of your plan, and run an iterative process to determine what will need to happen to ensure that goal is reached. Longview 7 makes it simple to determine essential data, such as the number of units that must be sold to reach a revenue target or the best debt vehicle for financing a cash shortfall. It has a unique modeling engine that allows complex calculations and what-if scenarios to be an integrated part of your planning process.
• The Strategic Plan
Longview 7 enables organizations to establish a strategic plan and use it to drive an integrated and collaborative planning, budgeting, and forecasting process across the enterprise, supporting more accurate and forward looking business decisions. You can define your key performance indicators, and measure performance against long-range plans on a dynamic and continuous basis.
• Salary Planning
Salaries and benefits, often a significant organizational expense, can be effectively managed and optimized with a direct and positive impact to your bottom line. With the salary planning capability, your organization can plan salaries by employee, position, or FTE, at any level of detail, model the impact of factors such as collective bargaining agreements or changes to pay scales, ultimately increasing the effectiveness and accuracy of your planning process.
• Capital Planning
Effectively managing capital investments in areas such as real estate, equipment, and vehicles is critical. Longview 7 enables your organization to plan for and manage these expenses, and to calculate depreciation by various methods, ensuring the appropriate accounting treatment is applied and integrated with the financial statements.
• Project Planning
The ability to strategically allocate funds to the numerous projects or initiatives your organization has underway or is evaluating is an integral part of the complete plan. With Longview 7, your organization can determine the impact of these initiatives on your financials, using methods such as Net Present Value (NPV) and Discounted Cash Flow (DCF), enabling decisions on which projects can and should be undertaken, and which discontinued.
• Rich, Easy to Use Web and Excel Interface
Users can securely access information from any location, inputting and viewing data quickly and easily in real-time. Results are available dynamically and can be viewed ad-hoc via the Web or Microsoft Excel. Longview Smart Client empowers end users by allowing them convenient and easy access to powerful, interactive modelling functionality through the web, while hiding the complexity behind it.

The Benefits:

Longview Planning provides the following advantages:

• Highly sophisticated modeling capabilities allow you to create, analyze, and assess business rules and what-if scenarios within your planning process to help drive your strategic goals.
• An innovative, highly scalable and secure technology architecture supports tens to thousands of users throughout an organization with virtually no impact on software performance.
• All data, business rules, and key drivers integrated into a single repository of accurate information provides easy access to all employees involved in the process.
• Elimination of cumbersome, time-consuming activities enables Finance employees to shift their focus from data collection to meaningful data analysis.
• A single repository of financial truth gives users a unified, consistent view of plans, budgets, and forecasts, empowering debates on business decisions rather than data accuracy.