Vendors: Prioritize Enterprise Planning

A few weeks ago, I argued that higher education’s expectations of technology vendors are too low. Most institutions, and most vendors serving them, are still having the wrong conversation. They stay focused on transactions and user experience: better HR workflows, cleaner financial reporting, faster close, fewer manual touches. But that is not enough to separate institutions that adapt from institutions that get exposed.

Over the next five years, the capability that will matter most is one that institutions still under-demand and vendors still under-deliver: enterprise planning.

What Does Enterprise Planning Actually Mean?

Enterprise planning is not just annual budgeting, basic forecasting, or a planning tool sitting inside the finance office. It is an operating capability: a connected, institution-wide system that spots change early, runs scenarios quickly, and aligns action across finance, HR, enrollment, academic planning, facilities, advancement, and IT.

Why Is Volatility Now the Operating Reality in Higher Education?

The last six years have made it clear that volatility is not a temporary condition in higher education; it’s now a defining characteristic. Institutions that still treat disruption as episodic are planning for a world that no longer exists. It’s a weak operating assumption given all that we’ve seen—and the fact that nearly every institution, regardless of size or sector, is experiencing budgetary pressures due to the market shifts and uncertainty.

Enterprise planning is how institutions prepare for conditions they cannot predict. Vendors and implementation partners need to stop treating this like a bespoke consulting exercise every time. The best vendors are positioned to productize operating intelligence, and institutions should demand it upfront.

Why Should Vendors Productize Operating Intelligence?

Vendors have structural advantages that individual institutions do not:

• Pattern recognition across dozens or hundreds of customer institutions
• Deep knowledge of the platform’s data model and how it performs in real operating environments
• Ability to leverage that data model to create dynamic planning environments

That should lead to packaged enterprise planning capability.

Why Is the “Bag of Legos” Approach No Longer Enough?

An 80 percent model is a planning-ready starting point built on native platform data structures and designed to be adapted, not rebuilt from scratch. Some implementation partners are moving in this direction by bringing optimized industry models to the table, and some planning vendors have comprehensive data models ready for higher education. But not enough of them. And the market still is not applying enough pressure to make it standard.

Vendors should not be bringing just a bag of Legos to the table…

What Should a Planning-Ready Model Include?

• Enrollment-driven labor modeling that connects course demand, staffing, and cost
• Tuition and discounting scenarios tied to net revenue and aid policy shifts
• Program viability models that combine cost to deliver, demand, retention, and capacity constraints
•  Space and facilities utilization scenarios tied to academic plans and scheduling realities
• Grant portfolio models with external drivers and flowing to facilities, staffing, compliance, debt, and cash flow timing

What Questions Should Enterprise Planning Help Institutions Answer?

Most transaction-system planning models explain what happened, or what will happen with changes to traditional drivers. That is not enough anymore. Enterprise planning answers a harder and more important question: what should we do when multiple external drivers change in the course of a fiscal year? What are the impacts on long-standing plans in facilities, investments, debt, and tuition discounts?

This need is showing up in the market. Institutions are writing RFPs that demand connected planning across finance, enrollment, workforce, and space. They are signaling that planning needs to be continuous and cross-functional, but demand signals are not the same as delivered capability.

What Should Vendors Do Next?

Develop and Ship Planning-Ready Models

Institutions should not have to pay to reinvent baseline planning logic on top of well-understood higher education data models. Deliver models with clear drivers such as enrollment, retention, workforce capacity, and space constraints. Then help institutions tailor the last mile. The common inputs are usually not the problem. The local weights, constraints, and politics are.

Make Implementation Less Artisanal

Enterprise planning will fail if institutions need two years of custom work before they can run a real scenario. Time to first scenario needs to drop. Fast.

Treat Governance as Part of the Product

Institutions will not solve definitions, processes, and decision rights by accident. Implementers should build governance accelerators and operating cadences into both the product and the implementation approach. Otherwise, they will keep delivering dashboards that explain surprises after they happen.

Higher education is raising its expectations. Will the vendor community meet that need with a real product or keep selling planning as a tool plus a services bill?

We recently published new research on financial planning and analysis tools, and on how those tools can serve as a foundation for real enterprise planning. That research should help level set the conversation around what the market is actually delivering today.

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Originally posted by Dave Kieffer on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow him there to catch all his great industry insights.