Board was founded in 1994 and employs more than 570 people. Both its European head office and software development headquarters are located in Chiasso, Switzerland. The company also has regional headquarters in London, UK, and Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Board has worldwide offices and a global partner network. More than 2,100 customers use Board to implement planning, performance management and analytics projects. The ownership of the company changed in 2019, when Nordic Capital acquired a majority share to support the vendor’s continued international expansion.
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Board aims to provide a modern and intelligent planning platform which supports fast, automated and transparent decision-making. The scalable platform helps enterprises discover insights that drive business decisions and unify strategy, finance and operations through integrated and agile planning to achieve control of performance. Platform capabilities (integration, security, etc.), planning and automation functionality, AI/ML, and analytics, reporting and collaboration features are unified in an easy-to-use, no-code solution for business power users to build tailored applications. Board does not focus on specific industries, but the primary industries across its customer base are retail, manufacturing, professional services, banking and finance.
Board offers a combined product consisting of a front end and a proprietary multidimensional in-memory data processing technology, which also allows for business-user-friendly data modeling. The product provides a consistent, technically homogeneous environment for administration, development and utilization. Due to its tightly integrated front and back ends, the proprietary Board data model allows only limited access for third-party front ends. Board is available in the cloud (leveraging Microsoft Azure) and, if required, on-premises.
At its core, Board is a flexible web-based development environment for creating custom planning and performance management applications. The product offers planning and predictive capabilities but also reporting, dashboarding, analysis, advanced analytics and financial consolidation functionality. Particularly for planning, forecasting and simulation use cases, Board offers strong and comprehensive functionality. Users can create and tailor a broad range of applications specifically to their own needs bringing together financial and operational data. Together with its partners, Board now has a strong focus on enhancing the platform with prebuilt business content including connectivity to data sources, preconfigured models, embedded industry best practices, workflows, reports and dashboards. Applications such as financial consolidation, lease accounting, workforce planning, integrated business planning and sales performance management are available from Board itself. Additionally, Board and its partners offer solutions for specific departments (e.g., finance, supply chain) and industries (e.g., retail, consumer packaged goods). These can be adapted to customers’ individual requirements.
User & Use Cases
61 percent of Board users are planning users – slightly below the survey average of 69 percent – reflecting the fact that Board is essentially an integrated platform with strong planning but also BI and analytics functionality. This is also born out in its typical use cases. Customers leverage Board mainly for operational planning (79 percent) but also financial planning (63 percent). Here, planning takes place at different aggregation levels. Board is used for budgeting (88 percent), forecasting (63 percent) and strategic planning (50 percent). Besides planning, customers mainly use it for standard/enterprise reporting (76 percent), ad hoc query (71 percent) and dashboards/BI applications (67 percent). Many respondents also plan to use it for strategic planning (48 percent), forecasting (27 percent), financial planning (26 percent) and group consolidation (25 percent) in the future.
Board targets mid-sized and large companies across all industries. 58 percent of our sample of Board customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 100 users (including 39 using planning functionality), but the mean of 162 users (91 for planning) indicates there are also several larger implementations.
Current vs. planned use (planning use cases)
N=50
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=50
Total number of users per company
N=50
Planning users per company
N=50
Percentage of employees using Board
N=50
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=50
Company size (number of employees)
N=50
Versions used
N=46
Summary of Board highlights
With 14 top ranks and 18 leading positions across six different peer groups, Board once again achieves an outstanding set of results in this year’s Planning Survey. Convincing ratings in numerous important KPIs help to consolidate its position as a market-leading performance management, planning and analytics product that delivers considerable benefits to its customers. Companies can benefit from using Board in terms of increased transparency of planning, more precise/detailed planning and improved integration of planning with BI/analytics. Overall, these benefits have led to a better quality of planning results for many customers. 96 percent of Board users say they would “definitely” or “probably” recommend their planning product to other organizations – a strong result and a great indicator of customer satisfaction with the vendor and its product.
Reporting/Analysis – Top-ranked
Peer group: Financial Consolidation-Focused Products
Reporting/Analysis – Top-ranked
Peer group: Planning-Focused Products
Self-Service – Top-ranked
Peer group: Planning-Focused Products
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