Digging into Spring19: Faster and Easier Data Integrations

We’ve packed hundreds of changes into Spring19, but we’ve distilled them down to four areas of impact. Here’s where our customers will see the most value from Spring19:

• Enhanced Workflows
• Modern User Experience
• Greater Control
• Extended Data Integrations

Every aspect of business is becoming more data driven. If you’re not capturing and analyzing more data from more areas, you’re missing out on insights and opportunities. Most organizations get this, so more applications are being deployed and connected in order to collect more data.

Where data truly becomes transformational is when it’s joined with data from other systems to provide broader and deeper insights, and to also automate and streamline data sharing so more people (and other applications) can use the data. That’s where integration comes into play, and Spring19 brings some great news in this area.

Native integration with Workiva

We partnered with Workiva a couple of years ago to connect their productivity solutions to our EPM platform. The outcome allowed organizations to use both company’s solutions together to streamline performance management and financial and management reporting, and further allowed them to upload detailed financial data and reports to Workiva Wdesk.

Now we’ve expanded that relationship with Workiva in Spring19 to extend native integration and better enable performance management that cuts the time, effort, and costs of regulatory reporting. This “last mile of finance” is where your day-to-day finance effort hits the external world, and as we all know, it’s not always the most pleasant or efficient of processes. This integration makes it easier for our joint customers to connect our two solutions and make performance management and reporting easier and faster.

 

Enhancements to NetSuite integration

Spring19 includes new integration capabilities for our customers using NetSuite and our NetSuite Connect integration. Now we support the loading of data from formulas fields, multi-select fields, and summary fields in NetSuite. Saved searches can now be Public, Private, or Shared. This gives business users the ability to capture more diverse data sets more quickly and more easily. Also included in Spring19 is the new ability to change the Netsuite Data Load Rule type to either a file load, a copy and paste, or web service.

Now, instead of recreating data load rules in their entirety, you can just edit them to change the load type. So you’re not only eliminating the chance of manual errors in recreating the rule, you’re getting more consistency when loading data across different types because you’re starting with the same rule. It lets you confidently and quickly change types with almost no effort.

Automatically loading missing segment members

Your business is always changing. You are expanding into new markets, launching new products, acquiring new customers, and broadening the org structure. Your performance management application has to keep up if it’s going to be your single source of performance insights. So, it’s critical that your application can quickly and easily absorb these new additions to your business.

With Spring19, missing segment members are now automatically loaded by default, removing a few of the administrative clicks from the process. The result is faster data loads made easier, and with fewer of the annoying disruptions. Now, when a data load has a missing segment member, instead of stopping the load, the missing segment is automatically added to the Planful application and the load continues uninterrupted. This means that it’s easier than ever to ensure that your Planful application is always in sync with your ever-evolving business landscape.

Maintain fidelity across data load rules

Spring19 makes it easy to maintain data structure as you create new data load rules. Instead of recreating rules from scratch, you can now quickly copy the data structure of an existing rule over to a new rule. This saves obvious time, but also eliminates the possibility of errors and omissions.

Going further, Spring19 also allows you to copy data integration services processes. Now you can duplicate existing data integration processes, giving you a quick way to create new versions by just changing aspects of an existing version.

What’s next?

We’re already half-way through summer, which means Summer19 is well on its way through our development cycle. We’re not going to give you any spoilers here (sorry!) but if you were at Perform 2019, you might have some ideas of what’s coming next… It’s obviously all great and we know you’re going to love it.