Ali kidwaiData poet
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Editor's Note: In an era where rapid change is the only constant, traditional planning tools simply can’t keep up. This blog explores how Pigment’s planning platform redefines planning through AI, automation, and deep scenario modelling — helping enterprises to cut manual work, unify workflows, and make agile, data-backed decisions. Whether you’re in finance, sales, HR, or supply chain, you’ll find real-world use cases and insights into how next-gen planning solutions can future-proof your business.
How do you decide your next move? In today’s volatile business world, planning has turned into a continuous exercise of adaptation. One quarter you’re chasing aggressive growth; the next, you’re adjusting your forecasts because of demand shifts or macroeconomic headwinds. And while leadership expects swift, data-backed decisions, the reality on the ground is far more chaotic.
Planning today is holding businesses back.
Many organizations are stuck in the loop of fragmented systems, outdated spreadsheets, and disconnected workflows. With data flowing from various sources, plans are getting scattered across teams resulting in delayed insights, inaccurate inputs, and lack of confidence in every decision. Collaboration takes a hit. Planning for different scenarios turns into a painful, manual task. And by the time insights are gathered, the window of opportunity has already closed.
To navigate the complexities, the traditional planning tools are not going to work anymore. As per Gartner, by 2025, more than 60% of planning solution initiatives will be driven by xP&A. So, businesses need an agile and integrated platform that eradicate siloes, boost collaboration, and fast pace the entire decision-making process, which not only brings all the stakeholders together but ensures that everyone is working from the same, reliable source of truth.
That's where Pigment comes into play - a next-gen AI-powered integrated business planning platform built to break through the limitations of outdated systems. Today, in this article, we’re going to dive into Pigment’s core strengths, use cases, advanced AI features, and what sets it apart from other planning tools—equipping business leaders with the insights they need to make intelligent decisions, drive growth, and stay agile in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
Pigment is a modern business planning tool designed to help teams plan, forecast, and analyze all in one place. It brings together people, data, and processes into a sleek, feature-packed platform that empowers planners from all business areas to prepare for any situation that may arise.
With its built-in AI and automation features, Pigment decreases the manual tasks, delivers actionable insights, and make sure that your plans are always up-to-mark. This makes it an ideal fit for a variety of business functions.
Now that we've explored what makes Pigment a uniquely powerful planning platform, let's look at how these capabilities come to life across key business functions.
In industries like IT services, where contract structures and cost drivers vary widely, managing deal margins is a constant challenge. With Pigment planning tool, finance teams can take control of deal margin planning by simulating contract structures, pricing models, and revenue recognition in real time. Instead of navigating through spreadsheets, teams get a granular view of all margin-impacting variables across service lines and locations. This offers them to model multiple deal scenarios, collaborate with sales, and grasp the P&L implications on the go —leading to a more profitable, faster decisions with decreased financial risk.
In the CPG space, trade promotions often consume a large portion of the sales budget—yet their ROI is hard to measure. Pigment planning tool transforms how sales and revenue teams manage promotion planning by integrating predictive uplift models, scenario testing, and spend governance in a single platform. This helps teams reduce cannibalization, evaluate halo impact, and maximize promotional returns—while staying tightly aligned with inventory, demand, and business targets.
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In the Healthcare & Pharma (HCP) industry, workforce planning is not about numbers, it’s about getting the right skills in the right place at the right time. Whether it's aligning R&D staffing to clinical trial timelines or planning field reps for new drug launches, Pigment enables HCP firms to model headcount needs in real time. Teams can measure compliance impacts, forecast roles, and assess cost, and adjust plans based on regulatory shifts, attrition, or transforming market demands—ensuring workforce agility without hampering operational excellence.
In the Alco-Bev industry, where logistics charges, ingredient costs, and packaging variations fluctuate instantly, accurate material costing becomes significant to protect margins. Pigment planning tool allows cross-functional teams (finance, procurement, supply chain) to collab on a centralized platform that integrates BOMs, vendor contracts, and logistics costs. This help teams to simulate cost scenarios at the SKU level, assess profitability in real time, and align cost decisions with demand forecasts. The result is rapid, more adaptive planning that protects margins in a volatile sourcing environment.
Pigment's Insights feature harnesses the power of AI to provide automated contribution and variance analysis, so you can eliminate tedious manual drill-downs. It clearly shows you what's transforming and why, all with easy-to-grasp summaries and visuals.
But where it truly standout is its capability to recommend next steps, pinpointing areas that might need a little extra attention based on the search query or the data that’s come to light, making analysis more targeted and easy. You can instantly save the generated charts to your boards or easily share summaries with your team.
Sometimes things don't want attention on the surface. Even if your top-level numbers look good, Insights can help you see if underlying swings are worth investigating. For example, if global profits seem on track, Insights might reveal that specific regions or product segments are underperforming—a level of intelligence many tools simply don’t reach.
Pigment's AI Agents go beyond the usual chatbots or virtual assistants. Rather than just answering individual questions, these agents are built right into the planning platform and act like smart collaborators. They can take on broad business goals—like "improve our Q4 sales forecast accuracy"—and work independently to make it happen, analyzing data, making decisions, and taking action.
Pigment has recently rolled out three purpose-built Pigment AI Agents, each with its own distinct role, collaborating together like a teammate throughout the planning process.
✓ Analyst: Collates and analyses external and internal data to spot anomalies, identify trends, and grasp the factors influencing business performance.
✓ Planner Agent: Unites with the analyst agent to decode insights into actionable steps. With domain expertise in finance, supply chain, and operations, it aligns suggestions with business goals and market realities.
✓ Modeler Agent: Autonomously builds and updates the models underpinning Pigment and serves as the foundation for the Analyst and Planner agents.
Even with the excitement and hope for what AI can bring, organizations are facing challenges when it comes to implementing and scaling AI technologies. Explore this Agentic AI playbook for AI leaders.
Many platforms claim to offer AI forecasting—but often require data science support or third-party integrations. Pigment's Predictions feature brings the power of AI and ML to your planning processes. It uses sophisticated statistical models to examine historical data and numerous external influences like - promotions, marketing expenses, or holiday seasons—to curate accurate forecasts.
Whether you're gearing up for demand planning, forecasting revenue, or crunching financial forecast, this feature is designed to help enterprise make rapid, smart decisions. It not only saves you time but also offers an accurate view of what lies ahead for your business.
From managing erratic environments to planning for best- and worst-case predictive outcomes, AI-infused scenario modelling gathers all the potentiality for the most optimal path forward. While scenario planning has always been a feature of Pigment, but now it’s taken a big leap forward with some fantastic enhancements that really amp up its effectiveness.
✓ Dynamic What-If Analysis: Easily tweak key inputs such as - headcount, growth rates, or pricing — and watch how they impact your KPIs and forecasts in real-time.
✓ Real-Time Driver Updates: Changes in business drivers are immediately reflected throughout the model, so you can avoid manual recalculations and spreadsheet chaos.
✓ Cross-Functional Alignment: Ensure everyone in HR, Operations, Finance, and Sales is on the same page with their assumptions, breaking down silos and aligning strategies seamlessly.
✓ Side-by-Side Comparison: Effortlessly compare baseline VS scenario outputs using visual charts and tables, which help you take more informed decisions.
✓ Versioning & Collaboration: Save disparate scenario versions, share them with leaders, and collaborate in real-time within boards.
A- Yes, Pigment planning platform has the capability to integrate seamlessly with systems like CRM and ERP via APIs, native connectors, and scheduled imports—making sure a unified, real-time view of data that improves decision making and planning accuracy.
A- So, when it comes to privacy and enterprise-grade security, Pigment offers SOC 2 Type II compliance, encryption, and role-based access control. It provides granular user permission tailored for different users and teams, along with detailed audit logs, and regular security checks. This gives organizations full control and visibility over their data while meeting the highest compliance standards.
A- Pigment’s AI Agents augment teams with powerful digital support—accelerating insights, scenario modeling, and execution. They enable faster decisions, boost collaboration with AI-driven search and planning, and adapt to dynamic conditions. The result: intelligent decisions, high productivity, and better business outcomes—assisting teams to thrive in high-pressure fast-changing environments.
A- With deep experience in handling EPM solutions, Polestar Analytics helps organizations get the most out of their Pigment investment by focusing on practical, business-first outcomes. We work closely with teams to translate their planning needs into scalable models, ensuring implementations are smooth and aligned to real use cases.
Beyond setup, we simplify how users interact with Pigment—making navigation easier and workflows more intuitive. Additionally, post-deployment through a CoE-led model, we offer ongoing guidance, quick issue resolution, and process optimization to organizations so their teams can plan better, adapt faster, and drive decisions with confidence.
So, it can be stated that numerous organizations are held back because they don't have the correct tools and insights in place to plan, make strategic decision and adapt to change.
As an official Pigment partner, we bring in-depth expertise in enterprise business planning, AI-powered transformations, and data integrations to make sure that organization get the most value out of the platform.
Through this collaboration, business can take benefit of Pigment's robust business planning platform and Polestar analytics industry prowess to overcome these hurdles.
Would you really want to improve planning and leverage the impact of your team? Book a demo today for Pigment services!
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The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insights.
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