ApptioOne Demand Delivers Accurate and Transparent IT Service Planning

Demand planning — the process of forecasting the demand for services and then budgeting resources accordingly — elevates planning conversations away from cost-center codes and toward business value (and cutting waste). But what’s simple to describe isn’t easy to deliver.

Capturing demand from the business and translating that into actionable plans is often inflexible and inaccurate. Without a source of truth to aggregate demand, your plans will stay in ad-hoc tools and spreadsheets that live apart from your organization’s IT financial planning toolkit. Multiple stakeholders feel this pain.

Process owners, IT strategy, finance, and leadership often lack a framework to communicate and adjust demand plans, leading to a poor understanding of how demand will drive future costs. These stakeholders need to review and adjust budget tasks, calculate accurate unit costs, and understand how demand translates to expected forward-looking costs. When chargeback applies, owners must also analyze revenue, change prices, and accurately predict future costs.

Business consumers and relationship managers use consumption estimates that are time-consuming to capture and require defensive budget and resource padding. These stakeholders need accurate plans and rates to forecast service quantities for each business unit.

Application, product, and service owners spend too much time manually aggregating business demand and making tradeoffs between accurate budgets and timely ones. These stakeholders need a collaborative view of the demand for services from the business (and potential projects) to adjust rates during the planning cycle for accurate recovery.

ApptioOne Demand

ApptioOne Demand tackles these planning challenges by working alongside ApptioOne products. It’s a planning and management tool that ensures suppliers and consumers collaborate during the planning process. ApptioOne Demand enables technology organizations to understand aggregated demand needs for the upcoming period and variance to previous periods. At the same time, it gives consumers visibility to planned spend across services.

In our commitment to delivering that best-in-class demand planning solution, we listened to and learned from our customers’ feedback to make our solution approachable, flexible, easy to use, and easy to navigate. To do this, we built Demand within our ApptioOne platform to include a variety of out-of-the-box reports, editable tables, and integrations across our ApptioOne Plus, Billing, and Cost solutions.

With ApptioOne Demand, you can:

Source and aggregate service demand from business units

ApptioOne Demand eliminates planning inefficiencies by capturing demand for technical (e.g., compute, storage) and business-facing services (e.g., collaboration software) in a standardized, shared framework. This framework aggregates service-volume-sourcing forecasts directly from the business — eliminating the need for siloed, error-prone spreadsheets. The framework maximizes collaboration thanks to the unified system and tools like team-wide plans using plan-level comments. This ensures service owners and consumers collaborate during the planning process to enable technology organizations to improve accountability, predictability, and the accuracy of plans and budgets.

Plan, track, and influence consumption

Built with editable tables, ApptioOne Demand allows you to directly enter information or upload data the system understands (leveraging existing cost objects) and conduct scenario planning and modeling. By tracking consumption and understanding the impact of demand changes on costs and unit rates, ApptioOne Demand reduces budget padding and waste from over-provisioning. In addition, Demand provides active visibility into plan status, keeping you flexible by tracking actuals to plan and updating volume forecasts as needed. Owners can maintain agility in resource planning by understanding upcoming service demand, rapidly adjusting plans and rates, and justifying their changes based on actuals.

Improve unit-rate accuracy

ApptioOne Demand improves unit-rate accuracy by comparing actual unit rates to budgeted rates and rates in the most recent forecast. By showing the actual rates for services, ApptioOne Demand allows you to modify rates for those services and the associated cost to each consumer. Tracking actuals to forecasted volumes helps identify deviations to plan and flag the need to course-correct. Using scenario planning, owners can understand unit cost elasticity based on demand changes and simulated service prices for different scenarios to create robust, demand-driven financial plans. From a consumption standpoint, business consumers receive a predictable bill of pro-forma charges for services consumed.

Your organization cannot afford to waste its IT budget on inefficient IT financial management (ITFM). ApptioOne Demand sharpens your ITFM by prioritizing spend toward the applications, services, and initiatives that add the most significant business value.

Get started with ApptioOne Demand

If you are looking to source and aggregate service demand from business units, manage service consumption and improve unit rate accuracy, we are here to help. For more information, visit the ApptioOne Demand product page or request a demo today.