SourceForge Accelerates Budgeting, Forecasting and Reporting with Adaptive Planning Software
 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – October 16, 2007 — Adaptive Planning, the leading provider of collaborative business performance management (BPM) solutions, today announced that SourceForge has implemented its software to automate their financial planning and reporting. A leading online portal for the IT professional, software development, and open source communities, SourceForge has deployed Adaptive Planning and integrated it with their Oracle Financials system in order to accelerate their budgeting and forecasting processes and simplify reporting on both actual and plan information.

Within a five year span that began in 2002, SourceForge has transformed itself from a hardware company to the global technology community's hub for information exchange, goods for geeks, and open source software distribution and services. The company's network of web sites serves more than 32 million unique visitors each month and includes SourceForge.net, Slashdot.org, ThinkGeek.com, Linux.com, and ITManagersJournal.

“SourceForge and our network of sites bring the global technology community together, but internally we found that certain financial processes were still very manual,” said Jeffrey Chalmers, corporate controller, SourceForge. “Since standardizing on Adaptive Planning, we've been able to streamline our budgeting and forecasting processes. By integrating Adaptive Planning with our general ledger system, Oracle Financials, we have made it easier for business users throughout the company to receive more accurate information on a more timely basis, and to better analyze both historical and forward-looking information.”

Prior to implementing Adaptive Planning, SourceForge's financial planning system revolved around 17 interconnected Excel spreadsheets. The process of reporting to department heads involved another eight spreadsheets.

“Department heads had little say in the planning process because they lacked visibility into the information,” said Chalmers. “The situation came to a head when we were faced with presenting our annual plan to our board of directors. With our deadline fast approaching, we knew we needed a more efficient and reliable system.”

After implementing Adaptive Planning, the SourceForge team was able to create an annual plan, review it with senior management, and revise it in a brief two-day period. As a result of the application's intuitive, spreadsheet-like interface and browser-based access, business unit owners and department heads from across the company were able to login and begin collaborating on the planning process.

Using Adaptive Planning, the company now revises its forecasts on a monthly basis, enabling key stakeholders to work with the most current actual and plan information in a single, easily-accessible online application.

“People who had never participated in the planning process are now creating their own budgets and managing monthly forecasts, which increases their financial accountability and gives department heads greater visibility for better decision-making,” added Chalmers.

SourceForge chose to deploy Adaptive Planning's on-demand, software as a service option, allowing them to implement the solution quickly and easily, without placing any burden on IT resources. Another benefit of the on-demand model is that they receive automatic upgrades to new versions of the application, such as the recently-released Adaptive Planning 4.0.

SourceForge has integrated Adaptive Planning with their Oracle Financials system, enabling the company to more easily create reports and perform analyses that compare actuals to plan or forecast data. This integration will also help streamline month-end closing and SEC reporting.
“Automating our integration with Oracle eliminates manual uploading and report generation tasks during the month-end close process, when time is very valuable,” added Chalmers. “With Adaptive Planning's latest 4.0 release, our department managers now have an extremely easy-to-use drag and drop reporting tool that incorporates actual data, allowing them to view their performance against plans and up-to-the-month forecasts.”

About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the leading provider of collaborative business performance management (BPM) solutions. Adaptive Planning makes it easy for midsize companies and departments of larger corporations to move beyond spreadsheets and improve decisions by automating their budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis. Adaptive Planning provides extraordinary flexibility and value, with on-demand and on-site solutions, open source and commercial licensing terms, and pricing — including a free version of the product — that delivers a total cost of ownership that is a fraction of the cost of traditional BPM and business intelligence software. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View , Calif. and can be reached at 650-528-7500 or www.adaptiveplanning.com .