Background:

Forecast expenses are calculated in ITP based on "Existing" and "Planned" Components of IT. Existing components (i.e. Headcount, Assets, Contracts) currently incur expenses within the company's financial environment and typically sit within a financial system. Planned components are future demand that cannot be pulled from Existing Headcount, a Fixed Asset Ledger, or a Contracts List within Workday, Oracle, etc. 

When a company initially builds out their ITP environment, a baseline plan/forecast is created using existing Headcount, Fixed Assets, and Contracts. As this data is provided out of a system, the TBMA/Cost Center Owners can have assurance of the accuracy of this data. Typically, when preparing a new Forecast in ITP, the TMBA will create the Forecast as a Baseline off of the previous Forecast. Cost Center Owners will then update the new Forecast for Existing Components, i.e. newly hired Headcount, acquired Fixed Assets, and signed Contracts. Cost Center Owners will repeat the same process for Non-Existing Components, i.e. future demand for Headcount, Fixed Assets, and Contracts.

Problem Statement:

Due to the manual nature of the process described above, there is a large risk of Existing Headcount, Existing Fixed Assets, and Signed Contracts to become out of sync with the Company's authoritative systems that are used as a financial source of record. This is due to an environment where two systems (i.e. Workday and ITP) are trying to tell the same data story (Existing Headcount) without being systematically linked. As a result, Cost Center Owners will have less faith in the ongoing accuracy of data, and will be forced to perform time consuming, unnecessary, and highly manual data reconciliation to identify variances that need to be fixed. If such a reconciliation is not performed, the accuracy of monthly forecasts will diminish over time, as ITP becomes increasingly out of sync with the source system.

Solution:

A mature ITPF Customer should be consuming system data for Labor Headcount, Fixed Assets, and Contracts using an API/Datalink Connector from their source systems in TBM Studio. This data should be leveraged on a monthly basis as a "true-up" for Existing Component data in ITP. As there is no in-product solution for this problem, we have created and documented a configured solution leveraging both ITP and TBM Studio to ensure that system data is updated in ITP on a monthly basis without losing previously planned demand.

For a walkthrough of the solution design and monthly TBMA steps for creating a new forecast with updated system data, please see attached PDF.