Understanding PeopleSoft Planning and Budgeting

This chapter provides overviews of:

The planning and budgeting process.
The application architecture.
Rule-based methodology.
Activities.
Role-based processing.
Workflow.

The Planning and Budgeting Process

Planning and Budgeting is an analytical application that helps you to conduct top-down target setting, and to generate a bottom-up budget which is at the foundation of your organization's operations. It helps management to evaluate business alternatives and set financial targets, and it enables the organization to work cooperatively and efficiently through the budgeting iterative process—expenses and revenue estimates are reevaluated; start and end dates are changed; and objectives are modified.

Planning and Budgeting enables different departments to use compatible tools, based on the same assumptions. By delivering a shared business model with role-based access over the internet, every participant can interact with his or her portion of the business plan or budget at any time, from any global location. You can respond quickly and efficiently to the changing business environment. Through what-if analysis and modeling, you can simulate headcount changes, expense control strategies, and capital investment plans prior to implementation. Marketing volatility and other deviations from the original plan can be handled proactively, in real time, rather than once a year.

Use Planning and Budgeting to:

Develop planning targets.
Access and analyze historical and current data.
Connect strategic objectives with daily processes.
Link top-down target-setting with bottom-up budgeting.
Integrate and update financial statements as business conditions change.
Conduct continuous forecasting.
Perform real-time, multidimensional modeling of your planning and budgeting data.

Like other PeopleSoft applications, Planning and Budgeting stores data in relational database tables. You can extract, view, analyze, and modify this data, and then move it back into the original tables. Understanding the concepts behind this process—and the tools that help you manipulate the data—helps you perform your role in the planning and budgeting process at your organization.

Planning and Budgeting guides you through the key elements of a budgeting process, as illustrated in this flow chart:

Planning and Budgeting Process

The Application Architecture

This section provides overviews of:

PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management Warehouse.
PeopleSoft Internet Architecture (PIA).
PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine (ACE).
PeopleSoft HRMS and Financial Management databases.
Reporting and analysis.

This diagram illustrates the Planning and Budgeting architecture:

Planning and Budgeting Architecture

PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management Warehouse

Planning and Budgeting is delivered with PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management Warehouse which is the data repository for all source system, planning, and forecasting budget information that is created by your organization. It supports enterprise-wide business analytics and enables easy data migration from PeopleSoft and non-PeopleSoft systems.

The Performance Management Warehouse stores the historical data used in the planning and budgeting process, as well as the results of the planning and budgeting process, which may be used in PeopleSoft Workforce Analytics, or additional reporting tools.

The following components comprise the Performance Management Warehouse:

Data acquisition tool (Ascential DataStage ETL tool)
Operational Warehouse Staging (OWS) tables
Data warehouse tables
Analytic applications
Data marts.

The extract, transform, and load (ETL) process collects data from dissimilar data sources so that the PeopleSoft Financials, Supply Chain Management, HRMS, and Customer Relationship Management analytical applications can access the data to complete their predefined jobs. After the analytical applications complete their jobs, ETL moves the data into the Performance Management Warehouse to further enrich (multi-dimensionalize) the data and move it into the data marts for reporting and analysis. Moving information from multiple sources onto one common platform lets managers and decision-makers more easily access their data for enrichment, analysis, and reporting.

Note. Planning and Budgeting does not require the use of data marts.

PeopleSoft Internet Architecture (PIA)

PeopleSoft Internet Architecture (PIA) lets you access Planning and Budgeting online. PIA is comprised of the PeopleTools Web Server and the PeopleTools Application Server. The PeopleTools Web Server serves pages to the browser and maintains states. The PeopleTools Application Server sends instructions to the web server and the PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse database and also implements the Planning and Budgeting business rules.

PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine (ACE)

ACE is a decision support tool that provides real-time, multidimensional modeling. The ACE grid is embedded in the Planning and Budgeting inquiry pages, where you can compare data across scenarios, versions, and time, as well as drag and drop dimensions to customize your analysis.

With ACE you can:

Perform scenario-based modeling and multi-dimensional analysis of financial data.
Generate accurate budget models using formulas to define rules and relationships across several dimensions.
Implement multi-user, role-based security.
Use interactive reporting to view, filter, group and sort the data to gain more insight into your enterprise.
Display cause and effect relationships, so you can easily see how parts of your model affect one another.

Note. You can use ACE to analyze line item activities data only, but not the position nor the asset activities data.

See Enterprise PeopleTools PeopleBook: PeopleSoft Analytic Calculation Engine

PeopleSoft HRMS and Financial Management Databases

As illustrated in the following diagram, the delivered extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool lets you import data from the PeopleSoft HRMS and PeopleSoft Financial Management databases into the PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management Warehouse to help you prepare the budget and exchange data between Planning and Budgeting and the following PeopleSoft applications:

Asset Management
General Ledger
HRMS
Projects

Planning and Budgeting Integration Points

You can also use data from third-party applications. Supplemental information about third-party application integrations is located on the PeopleSoft Customer Connection web site.

Reporting and Analysis

In order to help you assess and adjust your planning and budgeting process, we deliver an online reporting and analysis feature that lets you view query results online when you use any of the following pages:

Variance Analysis: to compare scenarios for an activity and planning center in the planning model.
Version Analysis: to compare any two budget versions for an activity, scenario and planning center in the planning model.
Compensation Analysis: to access cost and FTE data by position, job code, and employee.
Asset Analysis: to access data on an asset account, capital acquisition plan, capital acquisition sequence, or asset catalog item.

These query results are displayed online in an ACE (Analytic Calculation Engine) grid. You use the web-based, drag-and-drop feature to refine your analysis, preview the results, and modify the report format.

Rule-Based Methodology

Planning and Budgeting requires a general rule, formula or method that specifies how to calculate each value in an activity. It provides a highly configurable framework in which to build formulas – from easy to complex. Your organization is unique, so the system allows you to configure formulas for your industry and business.

This flexible formula framework is presented in a simple and intuitive wizard that includes built-in validations. The formula framework spans across planning centers and user-defined activities, providing true inter-related planning models.

Activities

Planning and Budgeting activities allow planning administrators and budgeting analysts to add and define each activity with the dimensionality that best fits their unique planning and budgeting needs. Activities may either be set up along functional areas or configured along lines of business such as geography or product-line. Each activity can have unique or shared dimensions, and unique or shared planning and budgeting centers that support their own workflow and security. This flexibility extends to configurable review and approval processes for each activity.

There are three types of activities:

Line item activity: use to view and change plan or budget amounts in a line-item format.
Position activity: use to add, modify, or view position data details, including salary, earnings, benefits, and employer paid tax costs associated with positions.
Asset activity: use to create, modify, or view assets and depreciation costs associated with capital acquisition plans.

The position activity and asset activity represent a greater level of detail than a line item, and therefore they are typically summarized into a line-item activity defined by activity relationships.

Role-Based Processing

For each organization, the planning process may be an iterative process and involve many people at different levels of the organization. The types of activities performed may depend on the individual job responsibilities associated with the specific role. PeopleSoft Planning and Budgeting enables you to set up security based upon user roles. Users can be assigned multiple roles. The roles also describe how people fit into PeopleSoft Workflow. Planning and Budgeting uses six roles:

A coordinator manages the overall budgeting process including setup, distribution, and consolidation of the budget, determines parameters and guidelines, and builds the planning model.
An analyst has responsibility for a planning center, typically a unit, department, or division within an organization. This user may break a plan or budget into smaller units for distribution to lower levels.
A preparer is at the lowest level of preparation for a planning center. This user provides line-item, asset, and position amounts, and justifications to higher-level users and does not usually perform allocations or analysis.
A casual preparer performs the same activities as the preparer role when access is granted. The system does not, however, enable the casual preparers to define their own private views for line-item activities.
A system administrator defines user security and access.
A reviewer has responsibility for reviewing and approving submitted budgets or plans for a planning center. In many cases, an analyst and a reviewer may be the same person.

PeopleSoft Planning and Budgeting uses standard security definitions from PeopleTools and PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management Warehouse to provide the correct access to various areas of the application, depending on your role in the organization.

The following diagram illustrates the roles within a process:

Roles in the budgeting process

Workflow

Workflow enables you to control and monitor the planning and budgeting review and approval process. You define workflow relationships for activities and use email to notify team members when milestone events occur during the preparation process, such as submit and reject. Trees are used to establish a routing hierarchy among the people notified.

With workflow each user is assigned a role in the approval hierarchy, defining his or her planning centers, actions and notifications. Users are modified when an action is required, such as entering or reviewing a budget. Overall status is communicated through emails, alerts and workspaces.