"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."
Planning and Budgeting with ace on-demand
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.
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 to fulfill the maintenance requirements.
By including capacity in the model, management can ensure that any capacity constraints are identified immediately, the model can also be used to calculate the estimated cost to increase capacity, whether this is a "step function" calculation to add a whole new resource (person) or an incremental increase for overtime calculations or outsourcing to an external contractor.
