Use cases by function
Planning models for the teams that run the business.
Orthantic supports planning across Finance, Supply Chain, Sales, Marketing and Workforce. Each team gets a model built for its own process.
Finance and FP&A
The pain, in their words
- The annual budget takes four months and is out of date before it is approved.
- Nobody is certain which version is current, and two people are working from different ones.
- The drivers sit inside cell formulas, so explaining what moved takes longer than the analysis did.
- A “what if” in a board meeting becomes a two-day exercise.
- Actuals land late, so the reforecast is always a month behind reality.
- Half the analyst month goes on reconciliation rather than analysis.
Close the gap between the plan and the month it describes
Build driver-based plans, update forecasts faster and spend less time on reconciliation.
Budget to forecast bridge
What moved between the opening budget and the closing forecast.
Illustrative figures. Volume and price add £6.8m between them; cost and FX take £4.8m back, leaving the forecast £2.0m above the opening budget.
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Annual budgetingCycle
Top-down targets and bottom-up submissions in one model, reconciling continuously rather than at the end.
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Rolling forecastCycle
A permanently current 12- or 18-month view that rolls forward automatically as each period closes.
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Driver-based planningMethod
Plan the drivers — volume, rate, headcount, price — and let the financial statements follow from them.
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Cost allocation and profitabilityAnalysis
Push shared costs through to product, customer or channel on rules everyone can inspect.
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Cash flow and working capitalAnalysis
Derive cash from the operating plan rather than modelling it separately and hoping they agree.
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Scenario and sensitivity analysisDecision
Hold several futures side by side and see which assumptions actually move the outcome.
Supply chain
The pain, in their words
- The demand signal is weeks old by the time supply plans against it.
- The consensus meeting is spent arguing about whose number is right rather than what to do.
- The capacity check lives in a separate spreadsheet that one person maintains.
- Long-range decisions — a line, a warehouse, a supplier — get made on instinct because modelling them properly takes too long.
- New products have no history, so they are forecast by analogy and then forgotten.
- Nobody can see what the plan looked like before someone overrode it.
One number, from the demand signal to the capacity that has to meet it
Keep demand, supply, capacity and financial impact in one model so teams can focus on the decision instead of the reconciliation.
Demand plan vs actual
Thousands of units. The interval band widens with the forecast horizon.
Illustrative figures. The consensus plan sits above the statistical baseline through the second half, and the gap widens into the Q4 peak — a judgement someone has made, and one the model keeps visible.
Rough-cut capacity: load vs capacity
Required hours per period against the capacity available to meet them.
Illustrative figures. Three periods — May, June and July — need more hours than the line allows, and May is the first, which is when the decision has to be made.
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Demand planningCycle
Statistical baseline from history, then planner and market overrides — with both preserved, so you can measure whether the override helped.
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Sales & operations planning (S&OP)Cycle
Sales, marketing, supply and finance reconciling to one number inside one model, on one cadence.
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Rough-cut capacity planning (RCCP)Check
Test the demand plan against critical resources — lines, labour, key suppliers — while the plan is still changeable.
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Long-term capacity planning (LTCP)Strategic
Model multi-year capacity, network and investment options, and see what each does to service and cost.
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Inventory and safety stock planningPolicy
Set stock targets from service level and variability, and see the working-capital consequence immediately.
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Supply and production planningExecution
Turn the agreed demand plan into a feasible production and sourcing plan against real constraints.
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New product introductionForecast
Forecast by analogy to comparable launches, then transition to the product's own history as it accumulates.
Sales planning
The pain, in their words
- Quotas are last year plus a percentage, and everyone knows it.
- A territory reorganisation breaks the model and takes weeks to rebuild.
- The pipeline forecast is a snapshot that is wrong by the time it is circulated.
- Comp plans are modelled separately from quotas, so the cost of a quota change is discovered late.
- Nobody can show how the bottom-up territory numbers add up to the company target.
Quotas that add up to the target, and stay that way after the reorg
Keep territory, quota, pipeline and compensation in one model so teams can see the effect of changes more clearly.
Quota attainment by territory
Bar is attainment against quota. The vertical marker on each row is quota.
Illustrative figures. Two of seven territories are above quota; Nordics is furthest behind at 74%, which is a £1.6m gap rather than a percentage problem.
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Territory and quota planningCycle
Allocate the target down the hierarchy on real potential, and see the roll-up reconcile as you adjust.
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Pipeline and revenue forecastingCycle
Weighted pipeline alongside the committed plan, with the gap explicit rather than implied.
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Key account planningAccount
Plan the largest accounts individually and see them consolidate into the territory and regional view.
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Incentive compensation modellingCost
Model payout curves against the quota plan and know the cost of a change before it is announced.
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Sales capacity planningResource
Work back from the target to the ramped, productive headcount needed to hit it, and when they must start.
Marketing
The pain, in their words
- The budget is allocated in November and barely revisited, whatever the year does.
- ROI is measured after the money is spent, which is too late to act on.
- The spend plan and the demand plan are unconnected, so promotions surprise the supply chain.
- Campaign plans live in project tools while the money lives in spreadsheets.
- “What happens if we move 20% from paid to trade” takes a week to answer.
Spend plans connected to the demand they are supposed to create
Connect marketing spend, phasing and promotional uplift to the demand plan so budget changes are easier to evaluate.
Budget reallocation, before and after
The same £13.0m, distributed differently.
Illustrative figures. £1.1m leaves paid search and £0.8m leaves events; trade promotion takes most of it. Brand is untouched. The total is unchanged, so this is a reallocation rather than a cut.
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Budget allocation and reallocationCycle
Distribute across channels, regions and brands, and reallocate mid-year with the consequence visible before committing.
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Campaign planning and spend phasingCalendar
Phase committed spend across periods and see the cash and P&L effect of moving a campaign.
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Promotion planning and upliftDemand
Model expected uplift and let it flow into the demand plan, so supply sees the promotion before it happens.
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Marketing-influenced pipelineFunnel
Plan the funnel from spend through leads to influenced revenue, alongside the sales plan it feeds.
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Channel mix scenariosDecision
Compare mixes side by side on the outcomes that matter rather than on spend alone.
HR and workforce planning
The pain, in their words
- The headcount plan HR maintains and the one finance maintains are different numbers.
- Attrition is a single hard-coded percentage applied to everything.
- The hiring plan has no timing in it, so the cost lands in the wrong months.
- Compensation review runs in offline spreadsheets with real salaries in them.
- Nobody can answer which skills the plan actually requires, or when.
One headcount plan, and it is the one finance is using
Plan people by role, location and time, with the cost in the same model so HR and Finance can work from the same plan.
Headcount bridge
People, not FTE. Opening to closing headcount for the plan year.
Illustrative figures. 186 planned hires and 64 transfers in are partly offset by 142 leavers and 57 transfers out — a net 51 people, which is the number the cost plan has to carry.
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Headcount and workforce planningCycle
Plan positions by role, level and location over time, with the fully-loaded cost following automatically.
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Compensation and merit planningCycle
Model merit, promotion and market adjustments within budget — and control who can see which population.
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Attrition and backfill modellingMethod
Attrition rates that differ by role, level and geography, with backfill timing and cost derived from them.
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Recruitment funnel planningOperational
Work back from required start dates through the funnel to the sourcing effort each month demands.
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Skills and capacity planningStrategic
Express the plan in the capabilities it needs, and see where the gap opens before it becomes urgent.
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Cost-to-serve and FTE allocationAnalysis
Allocate people cost to products, customers or services on rules that can be inspected and argued with.