Long-range planning to outpace your competition

As an FP&A leader, you understand that long-range planning (LRP) plays a critical role in shaping your company’s future. Your CFO expects financial plans to align with strategic objectives, proactively manage risk, and drive growth initiatives that keep the business competitive. However, traditional planning methods that are reliant on manual spreadsheets, fragmented data, and siloed teams can hinder your ability to make the agile, data-driven decisions your organization needs.

You need a planning approach that’s flexible, collaborative, and integrated across the enterprise. 

Planning for what’s next — not just what’s now

In the office of finance, you navigate complex dynamics such as market fluctuations, capital allocations, organizational transformations, and more. Your long-range planning must be able to effectively handle diverse scenarios, detailed assumptions, and cross-departmental insights, ensuring nothing falters under pressure to deliver confident results.

Common challenges include:

• Time-consuming, error-prone manual processes

• Lack of real-time visibility into financial impacts

• Difficulty aligning strategic initiatives with operational plans

• Data silos that hinder collaboration and insight sharing

• Inflexible models that can’t quickly adapt to change

Planning software that integrates data, automates workflows, and supports dynamic scenario modeling is key, but long-range planning goes beyond annual budgets and quarterly forecasts by connecting your corporate vision to actionable financial plans at every level — business unit, region, and product line. Ideally, it should let you:

• Define clear strategic objectives that drive growth and profitability

• Continuously update rolling forecasts to reflect changing market conditions

• Analyze multiple scenarios in real time to anticipate risks and seize opportunities

• Collaborate seamlessly across finance and operations teams for shared ownership

• Visualize impacts on P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow instantly

That’s where Anaplan’s long-range planning capabilities come in.

Sustainable planning that supports decision excellence

Anaplan transforms long-range planning into a strategic powerhouse by giving your FP&A team real-time flexibility, clarity, and control through our Integrated Financial Planning application that’s owned and maintained by finance, not IT. Here’s how you gain the upper hand:

• Align financial strategy with business execution
Connect high-level corporate goals to financial plans at the business unit, region, and product level. With Anaplan’s connected planning, strategic goals flow into line-item financials in real time, reducing reconciliation efforts and accelerating alignment.

• Plan across all three financial statements
Track and project revenue, expenses, and capital spending across your P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statement — all in sync. You get full financial visibility and can model investment impacts with confidence.

• Run scenarios in minutes, not days
Need to model the financial impact of entering a new market or launching a product? Anaplan lets you build, compare, and analyze multiple scenarios side by side — instantly. Identify risk and opportunity before they hit your bottom line.

• Break down silos and build trust
When business units see how their assumptions flow directly into long-range targets, engagement rises. Anaplan enables enterprise-wide collaboration that turns FP&A into a trusted strategic partner.

• Forecast with confidence and continuity
Your long-range plan never goes stale. Rolling forecasts in Anaplan help you continuously course-correct and adapt your plan to today’s market movements, not last quarter’s lagging data.

Real results for global FP&A teams

Global organizations like Bayer use Anaplan to plan smarter and move faster. Facing increasing complexity across its three divisions — Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Health, and Crop Science  — Bayer’s corporate controlling team sought to improve their financial planning processes across all three to support a consolidated and consistent picture. 

Bayer’s standard planning processes includes:

• Their operational planning conference (OPC) for annual budgeting and a three-year financial outlook

• The strategic conference (StraCo) for long-range, 10-year planning and strategic investment scenarios

• Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) for continuous, data-driven performance assessment

These previously manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes are now agile, automated, and centrally connected in Anaplan — giving Bayer the ability to consolidate divisional plans, model scenarios faster, and confidently guide strategy.

As a result of Anaplan, Bayer’s finance team achieved:

• Accelerated scenario and sensitivity modeling, enabling instant visibility into financial impact across key KPIs like EBITDA, free cash flow, and net debt

• Integrated quarterly forecasts and 10-year strategic outlooks in a single platform, ensuring consistency across all planning horizons

• More time for strategic decision-making, with intuitive interfaces that support real-time discussions during the OPC, StraCo, and QBR meetings

• Reduced manual workloads through automated planning workflows

• Freed-up resources for high-value activities like innovation and long-term investment planning

That’s what happens when you give finance the tools to lead — not just report.

Step into smarter planning with AI at the core

Long-range planning doesn’t need to be static, siloed, or slow. By leveraging Anaplan’s AI-infused IFP application, finance teams lead with foresight and agility — transforming into growth drivers ready to confidently guide the business through change.