Planning business processes

Here you will learn how to set up sales and operations planning and financial planning for a new planning period. In the application, you can create the necessary planning stages and adjust them to the current planning practices of the enterprise.

A budget process is a chain of sequential or parallel business process stages aimed to create and approve enterprise plans. As a rule, budget process settings depend on the current enterprise regulations. A single chain of planning stages is created at the budgeting model level.

You can apply the business process management to manage processes of financial (budgeting) planning and sales and operations planning. You can monitor stages of sales and operations planning and financial planning in a single budgeting model. We recommend that you create a separate budgeting model for sales and operations planning only if you do not run financial planning in the application. To find out how to create budgeting models, see Basic settings of financial planning page above.

We recommend that you set this up after you configured the following sales and operations planning sections:

• Demand forecast
• Supply plans
• Master plans

And after you set up the following financial planning sections:

• Basic settings of financial planning
• Capital investment budget
• Income and expense budget
• Equity change budget
• Cash flow budget
• Balance sheet budget

Stages contain specific parameters that help you automate the process stage management and fulfillment. For example: action kinds, time standards, and certain plans/budgets. When you use this feature, the application creates separate budget tasks based on stages. You can create budget process tasks with a background job or manually. The background job will run according to the schedule configured in the scheduled job. Budget tasks are always assigned to certain users. These tasks contain all the necessary parameters to carry out budget process stages. Within stages, users can:

• Fill planned values for the first time
• Check planned values and provide feedback
• Update planned values
• Approve the plan
• Control the plan fulfillment

Now, processes of sales and operations planning and financial planning are created and set up.