Looking to get input from the community on what kinds of systems/processes people are currently using to manage their maintenance budgets and forecasts.  We're using excel and it's a pretty big pain point in our budgeting process.  There's no capability to easily identify items that have scheduled increases so they don't come as a surprise when they do increase; no real accountability in terms of budget owners submitting or maintaining data; and from an Apptio perspective, no easy way to tie the data to towers/apps/services/etc.

Does anyone else have an application they are using that has worked well for them?  Does Apptio ITPF have any capabilities that could be leveraged in this space?

We do have similar challenges to what I can read between the lines of your question.

I'm taking the initiative to use ITPF maintenance contract capabilities as the first step towards improving the maintenance management processes here. My approach is that ITPF is providing for the first time a central source of contract information that everyone can access, and can be used to "normalize" processes. So far I have completed the centralization milestone. I'm now reaching out to people to have them use it, and eventually we will get to the process question.

At the end of the day my objective is to improve the planning and forecasting aspect of contracts.

That's great to hear, Juan Jose! With Apptio's IT Planning Foundation contract planning capabilities, budget owners can get a view of all vendor contracts, including renewal dates, total contract values, notice periods and budget increases. Budget owners can easily manage contracts that span multiple years, see which contracts are up for renewal within the plan year and the total amount represented by those renewing contracts. You can also view the impact of renewing contracts on your overall budget, as well as whether those contracts renew at a higher rate. IT Planning Foundation automatically handles the amortization of pre-paid contracts so that your Opex budget matches how contract actuals will be reported.

For more information on Contract Planning:

Contract planning (Outdated; click for updated version)

VIDEO: IT Planning Foundation: Contract Planning

ITPF looks like it might be a solution, but as I was reviewing the Overview and video, I didn't exactly see a place where the Line Items could be tagged as far as what towers/apps/services their costs should roll up to.  I'm envisioning that ITPF and CT would talk to each other such that a maintenance line item in ITPF would be able to direct costs in CT to a specific tower/app/service.  I see you can add custom attributes to line items, so I'm imagining this is how it would be done, but I'd be interested in anyone's experience in making this work.

That's right, you can use custom dimensions to capture and report on additional budget details you need to manage your budget process such as tower/app/service. You can also integrate your IT Planning solution to Cost Transparency so that you can publish plans from ITPF to CT.

Additional resources:

Overview: Manage custom data in IT Planning Foundation

Integrate with Cost Transparency