Business Planning and Forecasting Application for Synopsys, Inc.

ABSTRACT BUSINESS PLANNING AND FORECASTING APPLICATION FOR SYNOPSYS, INC. by Murughendra Shirahatti Master of Science in Computer Science California State University, Chico Fall 2009 Business/Financial Planning is an integral part of the management cycle. Companies are situated in complex environment like different geographical environment, political situation, competitive landscape, etc. Different companies follow different business models (such as public sector vs. private owned companies). Depending on their overall company goal (increasing operating margin, increasing earnings, decreasing expenses etc.), companies formulate plans to achieve those goals in an efficient manner. To achieve these goals, executives in a company need to make timely and welleducated business decisions. To make these decisions executives of a company need information on expenses, earnings, assets, employees etc. To maintain edge in this competitive environment companies not only need to make policies and decisions in the present environment, but also need to have clear vision for the future. This vision for future depends on present information and projection of future information (i.e., simulation of business data for future time periods or planning for future). Planning supports decision making, coordination of different divisions in company towards achieving common goal. Business Planning helps identify the means and ways for optimal operational efficiency. Reporting based on planning tracks all transactions incurred by execution process. Analysis as part of business planning focuses on calculating success of objectives achieved and seeks out reasons for any deviations. The result of the analysis is measured against the company mission and leads to an evaluation of overall goals and actions to be taken in order to steer the course. Primary objective of this project is to implement a comprehensive financial planning system for Synopsys, Inc. BW-BPS application will be used to address the existing FP&A (Financial Planners and Analyst) pain points and provide capability to drive flexible planning processes. This system will be used to do planning primarily in two areas, employee planning and expense planning, with flexibility to extend it to sales planning, depreciation planning, profit and loss planning. This system will incorporate cutting edge technologies in business intelligence and operational systems, as datasource and data warehouse for planning. Extensive OLAP capability of SAP BI system will provide a comprehensive multidimensional reporting capability. This project will help Synopsys Inc to alleviate all the pain points’ associate with traditional planning in operational systems. It will greatly reduce the planning tine, increase efficiency and accuracy. This application will provide a greater insight into the business data and also reporting on that data in multi-dimensional manner, thus giving different views of the same data which will help executives in making well educated and timely business decisions.