IBM Gold Partner

IBM Planning Analytics

Empower your business on a platform built for financial, sales, supply chain, HR, demand planning and more. With speed, flexibility, and foresight. IBM Planning Analytics enables your business to look at granular financial and operational data at any level of detail. Empowering your business to adapt quickly in an economic environment of heightened uncertainty.

Take your financial planning one step further with the automated and easy-to-use planning, budgeting, forecasting, and analysis processes that can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. IBM Planning Analytics features a customisable workspace and includes an option to use the Microsoft Excel interface if needed to increase adoption across your business.

Take back control of planning and processes, and enable your business and team to link key business drivers to financial KPIs, along with discovering trends whilst also delivering valuable business foresight. With a planning and analysis solution like IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1, you can:

• Create budgets and forecasts in a timely and reliable manner.
• Perform in-depth scenario analysis on what-ifs to test and compare assumptions for in-depth profitability and scenario planning.
• Analyse profitability by product, customer, region, and more by building complex
• multidimensional models.
• Increased transparency with a clear audit trail of all changes and updates.
• Personal Sandbox environments allow you to understand the impact of your decision – without making the commitment. Ensuring that your business is always one step ahead
• The ability to eliminate manual and time-consuming processes with automatic insights.
• Visualise compelling information to support the communication of financial insights,

and;

• Collaborate and integrate plans across Finance, Operations, Sales, Supply Chain, Human Resources, and more.

As an IBM Gold Business Partner, Simpson Associates is the longest-serving IBM consultancy in the UK with the experience and expertise to help you discover, implement, and adopt the technology. Our experts are led by a team of certified accountants, who have the financial insight to understand the challenges of your finance team.

IBM Cognos Analytics

Bring your data to life and unleash your business potential with IBM Cognos Analytics. With the power of AI, now more than ever before, you and your team can visualise your business performance with a robust set of dashboards and reporting options, which can be shared seamlessly and securely across your organisation.

Combine data and collaborate effortlessly with automated data preparation and machine learning to interpret your data, uncovering hidden patterns and insights to help you and your team make more informed decisions.

With IBM Cognos Analytics, you can:

• Infuse business intelligence across your enterprise and obtain faster insight to help you make meaningful business decisions through dynamic and intuitive data analytics;
• Take advantage customisable dashboards and reports with an intuitive interface made accessible to your team;
• Control who has access to sensitive information within your organisation, and share analytics seamlessly across your team;
• Make decisions based on trusted data and uncover new insights with the flexibility to report from multiple data sources.

Use business intelligence to guide your organisation with self-service capabilities designed to address the need for agile and intuitive analytic solutions. IBM Cognos Analytics delivers a personal approach to analytics by empowering businesses, allowing both individuals and teams to overcome complex challenges with a powerful and proven IT solution that can be easily scaled as your business continues to grow. Connect people and ideas with a single environment built to improve business performance with easy collaboration across your organisation.

You’re in safe hands with our expert and certified IBM Consultants, who work with this technology daily. We can guide your organisation through every step of IBM Cognos Analytics consultation, implementation and training.

Integrated Forecasting Solution

In today’s constantly changing environment, plans become redundant very quickly. Businesses must respond to changes quickly which is the only way to stay in control in an ever-changing world.

Introducing ‘FORECASTED’ a multi-dimensional solution with a self-serving video based training programme. Hosted by Simpson Associates, there’s no need for hardware or in-house servers, you’ll always be up to date with the latest technology upgrades. Use FORECASTED to create integrated profit and loss information, cash flow and balance sheets, specifically suited to your business. Create a new forecast based on your actuals or a previous forecast or budget, quickly make changes using a bottom-up or top-down approach and see your new forecast ready within minutes not days.

With all your information in one place, you can analyse your business’s past performance, create new forecasts, and monitor your future performance as often as you need. With many standard reports already set up for you to use and the ability to set up new reports and dashboards as required, FORECASTED will keep your business in control.

Forecasts should be easy to create and easy to explain. FORECASTED uses multiple graphics and dashboards so that you can understand and explain your forecasts better. Use waterfall graphs to show how you built your new forecasts, drill down into more detail from anywhere and see who is responsible for each part of the forecast. With access to a full audit trail, you will always know who entered what.

Student Number Planning

Achieve a flexible student number planning process that is agile, scenario-based, and responsive to the ever-changing nature of the Higher Education sector.

Simpson Associates offer Universities a flexible option for the management and future planning of student intake and educational lifecycles, both in course structure and income terms. These solutions are multi-dimensional, dynamic, driver-based models which put control and responsiveness in the hands of the University’s planning teams, schools, and faculty stakeholders, improving response times and organisational efficiency.

In regulatory terms, our student planning solution enables organisations to respond quickly to annual or ad-hoc changes required by organisations such as the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), or the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

As regulatory planning or investment assumptions change, whether at a general level, school, or even course level, this can be instantly reflected across the entire student model. Automatic feeds into revised targets and plans, deliver large savings in time and resources across finance, planning and the affected faculties.

Our team of experts can get your institution set up with a Student Number Planning Solution which can predict student headcount. This enables your Institution to report and plan for the fees generated.

Simpson Associates can work collaboratively with your institution, to understand your requirements and deliver a solution to suit your needs.