Temporal Aspects of Rolling ERP Planning
Agile approaches advocate dynamic planning and adaptation to new inputs and priority changes. The Beyond Budgeting Round Table movement promotes rolling planning, budgeting, and reporting.
The beyond budgeting techniques recommend the complete abolition of traditional budgeting processes. They require the implementation of new techniques that will replace them. The BB framework does not specify the exact techniques that are applicable to all companies.
However, there are some techniques that have proven to be effective in real cases in the past. These techniques include the following:
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Rolling forecasts are created monthly or quarterly rather than on an annual interval.
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Company’s targets are based on key performance indicators KPI.
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The performance of the company’s managers is evaluated based on external benchmarks rather than their past performance.
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Operational managers are empowered to react to the changes in the business environment and can dynamically coordinate their actions.
What are the consequences of rolling approaches to any CRM or ERP system?
Accounting
Rolling accounting is quite easy.
You shall display only transactions bocked during the selected time interval. You shall be able to generate the balance sheet for the date defining the start of the time interval.
The data are usable only if your accounting department does not tune the accounts at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year. For example, Swiss companies shall separate the rolling accounting from their legal accounting used for VAT or earnings tax purposes. A better approach is to define rules avoiding most of the tuning actions.
Customers, Activities, and Offers
No special effort is necessary. Customer relationship activities just need to be timely registered.
Contracts and Projects
Only the contracts and projects active in the selected time interval shall be displayed. Efforts booked during the time interval are relevant for the analytics.
Invoices
The invoices sent to the customers or the effectively paid invoices during the selected item interval shall be considered and displayed. These invoices are relevant for the computation of the cash flow and the financial success of the associated projects and contracts.
Implementation
The tangly ERP was extended to support rolling analytics based on a user-defined time interval. The system shall have all raw data available for the chosen time interval. The approach is similar to an event store. Designs based on a yearly reporting structure make the concept of rolling time periods almost impossible to realize.
The system supports the definition of a time interval to display only currently relevant entities.
The analytics time interval is independent of the system overall interval.
Lessons Learnt
Event sourcing concepts are very powerful to implement an ERP providing time-interval based visualization and analysis. The concept works well with the Domain Driven Design concepts.
The responsiveness of the application is impressive for data volume compatible with small and medium enterprises. We do not have empirical data for international companies. The approach works well if all data are based on true and fair booking.
Legal aspects in countries like Switzerland often imply that accounting reflects tax view instead of a true and fair view of the finances. Such systems are not compatible with the beyond budget concepts and will display skewed information. The whole financial system must be true and fair to enable rolling planning and reporting.