Technology meets transformation: modern planning with Clearsulting and Pigment
Modern planning has become a competitive advantage
Most organizations spend months building annual plans, only to spend the rest of the year explaining why they no longer reflect reality.
Market conditions shift. Hiring plans change. Customer demand evolves. Yet many organizations continue to rely on planning processes designed for a more predictable era.
The challenge isn’t that organizations aren’t planning. It’s that they’re using planning processes built for a world that no longer exists.
Business leaders need real-time insights and agility, but traditional planning processes are often too slow, fragmented, and reactive to meet those needs. In many organizations, planning is still treated as a periodic activity such as an annual budget, a quarterly reforecast, or a monthly variance review. While these cycles matter, they’re not enough when conditions can shift materially between planning windows.
At Clearsulting, we’re seeing this shift firsthand. Organizations are moving away from static planning cycles and investing in planning capabilities that support faster, more informed decision-making across the enterprise.
The shift to continuous decision-making
Modern planning is not simply a better forecasting process. It’s a fundamentally different operating model. Instead of asking, “What is our plan?”, organizations are increasingly asking:
- What’s changing?
- Why is it changing?
- What are our options?
- What should we do next?
Planning becomes a continuous capability rather than a periodic exercise. Finance evolves from reporting on what happened to helping shape what’s next.
Supporting modern planning requires more than digital spreadsheets or a centralized system of record. It requires a platform designed by default for speed, flexibility, and alignment across the enterprise.
Why organizations are choosing Pigment
As planning expectations have evolved, many legacy tools have struggled to keep up.
Spreadsheets remain useful for analysis, but become difficult to manage as planning complexity grows. Traditional EPM platforms often provide governance and control, but can be slow to adapt when business structures, assumptions, or planning requirements change.
Pigment has emerged as a disruptive force in modern planning because it was designed around a different vision: planning should be connected, collaborative, and continuously adaptable.
Through Clearsulting’s work with transformations, we’ve found three capabilities that consistently differentiate Pigment and help organizations accelerate value realization.
1. Accelerating time to value
Many planning platforms promise transformation, but require lengthy implementation cycles, extensive maintenance, and significant technical support before business users see meaningful value.
✅ Pigment’s flexible architecture enables organizations to deploy and evolve planning capabilities more quickly while reducing the burden of ongoing model maintenance. According to Pigment’s Total Economic Impact study by Forrester, organizations using their platform achieved a 306% ROI over three years, reduced forecasting effort by 50-60%, and generated more than $8 million in total business benefits. For organizations looking to modernize planning, the ability to realize value quickly can be just as important as the technology itself.
2. Faster decision-making through scenario agility and agentic AI
In today’s environment, organizations rarely struggle because they lack a forecast. They struggle because they need to understand how changing conditions will impact the business before decisions are made.
✅ Pigment makes scenario planning a core part of everyday decision-making. Business users can quickly create, compare, and evaluate scenarios without duplicating models or relying on technical teams for support. Whether evaluating hiring plans, pricing strategies, market expansion opportunities, or cost reduction initiatives, leaders can understand tradeoffs and potential outcomes in real time.
Pigment further extends this capability through native AI embedded directly within the planning platform. Rather than relying on disconnected AI tools, Pigment’s specialized AI agents operate within the same governed planning environment where decisions are made. The Analyst Agent helps users quickly identify key drivers, explain variances, and surface actionable insights, while the Modeler Agent accelerates model creation and maintenance through natural language interactions. By embedding intelligence directly into planning processes, organizations can move from data to decisions faster while maintaining trust in the underlying information.
The impact of this planning agility is becoming increasingly clear. Pigment found in their Uncertainty Index for Q1 2026 that organizations perform more than 70 forecasts per year, compared to approximately 30 forecasts among less mature organizations. These organizations also achieve nearly three times higher revenue growth (18.1% versus 6.2%), demonstrating the connection between planning agility and business performance.
3. A user experience built for adoption
The best planning platform is only valuable if people actually use it.
✅ Pigment combines enterprise-grade modeling capabilities with a modern, intuitive user experience that makes planning accessible beyond finance. Interactive dashboards, visualizations, and self-service reporting empower users across HR, sales, operations and finance to participate in planning and make more informed decisions.
This broader participation drives stronger adoption, improves organizational alignment, and helps embed planning into everyday business processes.
The user experience continues to be recognized by customers as a differentiator. Independent research from BPM Partners about Pigment found a 94% customer recommendation rate and an average customer satisfaction score of 4.33 out of 5, reflecting Pigment’s ability to deliver long-term value and adoption at scale. Additionally, Pigment has been recognized as a Gartner Customers’ Choice for Financial Planning Software for two consecutive years, with an overall rating of 4.7 out of 5.
Technology is only half the equation
Selecting the right platform is critical, but it isn’t sufficient. We’ve seen organizations invest in new modern planning technology and still struggle, because disconnected processes, inconsistent data, and low adoption limit the value the technology can deliver. Successful planning transformations require alignment across people, processes, data, and technology to ensure planning supports how the business actually makes decisions. This is where transformation efforts often succeed or fail.
How Clearsulting helps organizations realize the value of modern planning with Pigment
As a strategic Pigment partner, Clearsulting brings deep platform expertise together with extensive experience across finance transformation, FP&A, EPM modernization, and data strategy. We work side by side with organizations to design planning operating models, strengthen cross-functional collaboration, build trusted data foundations, and implement technology that advances real business objectives.
That means we don’t just help clients implement software. We help them answer bigger questions:
- How should planning processes evolve to enable faster decisions?
- Which decisions should planning actually inform?
- Which drivers matter most?
- How can Finance become a more strategic business partner?
- How can organizations accelerate adoption and long-term value realization?
By combining Pigment’s modern planning technology with Clearsulting’s transformation expertise, organizations can move beyond replacing legacy tools and begin building a planning capability designed for the future.
The future of planning is continuous
The organizations that outperform in today’s environment are not necessarily those with the most detailed plans. They are the ones that can adapt the fastest.
Modern planning is about creating the visibility, agility, and alignment needed to make better decisions in an environment that never stops changing.
Pigment provides the technology foundation for that future through connected planning, dynamic scenario modeling, embedded AI, and an exceptional user experience.
Clearsulting helps organizations turn those capabilities into measurable business outcomes through strategy, implementation, and transformation expertise.
The future belongs to organizations that can adapt faster than change itself. Modern planning provides that capability. Pigment delivers the technology, Clearsulting helps organizations turn that technology into a lasting competitive advantage.
Ready to take the next step? Download our FP&A Playbook to explore leading practices for modern planning, or connect with our team to learn how an FP&A Visioning Workshop can help define your organization’s path forward.