Because it's in such a competitive industry, The Weather Channel needs to be able to shift its financial priorities on a dime. To improve its agility, the company implemented a new business performance management (BPM) software system and a budgeting process built around driver-based planning.

BPM Magazine: What's The Weather Channel's process for budgeting and planning?

Scott Anderson: In terms of time frame, it's a pretty traditional calendar-year budget that we do in the fall, with quarterly reforecasts during the year. We forecast along our G/L chart of accounts, which is probably 120 accounts. What may be a little unique for a company of our size is that we are extremely decentralized in our planning environment; we have about 100 cost centers and about 75 budget managers who are all responsible for their own individual piece of the pie.

BPM: How do they come up with the budget numbers and transmit those to corporate management?

Anderson: That's changed dramatically since we implemented Applix. It used to be a very Excel-based process. Everyone would build their own custom Excel templates and budget models and submit them to finance, who would manually upload them into our PeopleSoft G/L. Since we acquired and implemented Applix, we have completely transformed that to a Web-based interface.

For phase one of the rollout, we published a single but familiar budget schedule, which simply consisted of the G/L accounts down the rows and the months across the columns. Department managers would enter their account level data into that schedule via the Web, which was instantly consolidated into Applix.

The second phase of our rollout was much more interesting. Keeping the familiar budget schedule as a starting point, we then developed some very detailed driver-based models behind each of those general ledger accounts. So now, instead of just entering in, for example, total consulting dollars, we have hyperlinked all of the accounts to these driver-based models. So now, when someone clicks on the consulting account it takes them to one of many driver-based templates that they can use to build up their cost projections using more operational drivers. That allows us to capture all of their assumptions and all of those drivers in the system, and allows us to have a very standardized set of easy-to-use Web-based templates. That's the system we started using last fall to complete this year's budget.

BPM: What would one of these driver-based templates look like?

Anderson: They are essentially just Excel-based models that get prettied up and pushed out to the Web. Since we in finance actually build these models/templates, being able to utilize Excel is obviously a huge advantage. To the end user, the templates have the look and feel similar to Excel, but people can't break them or change the formulas. And because the department managers are logging in with their own security credentials, they're only seeing their own departments and product codes. Obviously, they're entering data in just for their area and it gets consolidated based on those dimensions.