Planning and Budgeting
"Financial professionals often are caught up building budgets that make the 'numbers work'. The Activity-Based Planning and Budgeting approach puts work processes and resource capabilities in the 'front and center' of the planning and budgeting process."
CAPT Larry R. White, US Coast Guard, CMA, CFM, CPA, CGFM. "The Closed Loop - Implementing Activity-Based Planning and Budgeting" - CAM-I, Stephen C. Hansen, Robert Torok.
"The Closed Loop has a common thread that has persisted in management accounting for more than a hundred years: The attempts to link causes and effects."
Charles T. Horngren, Stanford University - Forward from "The Closed Loop - Implementing Activity-Based Planning and Budgeting.
The Planning and Budgeting functionality in ACE has been created based the CAM-I "Closed Loop - Activity-Based Planning and Budgeting" methodology. As identified in the CAM-I Closed Loop book, the traditional budgeting process has a number of flaws:
- Too time consuming
- Requires too many iterations
- Can be very costly
- Does not address capacity
- Is based on an extrapolation of prior period data
- Is influenced by political gaming
- Receives limited buy-in or acceptance of results
CAM-I formed the Activity-Based Planning and Budgeting Interest group to address these short comings and to develop a methodology to improve the budgeting process using Activity-Based concepts. A wiki has been created to capture issues and discuss solutions related to Planning and Budgeting on a broader basis http://www.cam-i.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.
The example model below demonstrates how ACE could be used to build an Activity-Based Planning and Budgeting model. In this example, as taken from the CAM-I Closed Loop book, the resource requirements and capacity are calculated based on a set "demand". In this case it is the number of hours an aircraft is required to fly, which determines the amount of maintenance required, and therefore the amount of resourcing needed to fulfill the maintenance requirements.