Customer Trends for 2022

As the year draws to a close, we wanted to take some time to reflect on what our customers have been prioritizing and asking for this year.

We hope that by sharing this information, you can see what your peers are thinking about and planning for 2023, and perhaps incorporate those into your own plans.

Migrating to Cloud

It may not come as a surprise to know that moving systems and infrastructure to Cloud has been high on the priority list for many companies this year. We have completed several migrations to Cloud this year, with several more planned for 2023. Customers who have Planning Analytics, Controller, or both have been migrating to Cloud, with some similar reasons why:

  • Remove the burden from their IT departments of maintaining and upgrading software
  • Access to regular upgrades and fixes, and modernised systems
  • Promoting self service and ownership for non-IT teams
  • De risking infrastructure by moving away from unsupported software

 

Sustainability

We have been having more conversations around ESG reporting and Sustainability. Several companies have built the capability to report, but are now looking for solutions to store and analyse the data. Planning Analytics has been a consideration for some companies, as it provides an OLAP database to store and interrogate data. Planning Analytics Workspace also provides a dashboarding, analysis and reporting tool to present and view the data. We expect to have more conversations going into 2023 as more business flesh out their requirements.

 

Incorporating AI

You may be familiar with the Forecasting feature in Planning Analytics Workspace. This feature allows a user to create a predictive forecast in Planning Analytics Workspace, based on historical data and incorporating the IBM Watson engine. There is plenty of development planned for this feature in 2023, which we believe will encourage more companies to use it. Currently, several customers use this feature to create their forecast prediction for items that are stable, either in price, seasonality or predictability. It gives them a more defined starting point, and saves them time on their forecast.

The development planned includes the ability to incorporate additional factors into the prediction and other sources of data, as well as improvements to the statistical methods used. We’re excited to see what else this feature brings as we progress through the year.

 

De-Risking

Whilst this covers a lot of exercises, we are seeing companies future proofing and mitigating risks in various ways. This includes documentation of models and the items associated within, moving as much reporting as possible out of Excel, and as above, migrating to Cloud. Documentation and moving as much out of Excel as possible is always something we would recommend, so it’s great to see several companies doing this for themselves.

 

Hopefully these give you some ideas, or reinforce an idea that you already had. We’re always happy to chat if this is something you would like to plan on your roadmap. Is there anything else you would add to this list that is a priority for your company in 2023? Let us know in the comments!