Who are Board International?

Board, formerly known as Board International, is a Swiss enterprise planning vendor whose platform brings financial planning, operational planning and business intelligence together in one place. For finance and operations leaders who are tired of reconciling separate spreadsheets, budgeting tools, and reporting systems, Board is one of the longer-standing names in the market, having built its Enterprise Planning Platform over three decades. Viewpoint Analysis is a Technology Matchmaker, helping businesses to quickly find and select new enterprise technology. Our aim is to be the place enterprise buyers go to understand the software and technology market before speaking to vendors. Read on to learn more about Board.

Who Are Board?

Board was founded in 1994 in Chiasso, Switzerland, and the company retains dual headquarters there and in Boston, Massachusetts today. Jeff Casale has served as Chief Executive Officer since November 2023, having previously led MarkLogic through its acquisition by Progress Software, following earlier senior roles at Dell Technologies and VMware.

Board is backed by Nordic Capital, which acquired the company in 2019, and now operates from 25 offices worldwide, serving several thousand customer organisations across more than 100 countries through a mix of direct sales and a global network of resellers and implementation partners. The company describes itself as the provider of an Enterprise Planning Platform that unifies strategic, financial and operational planning on a single technology base, rather than requiring separate tools for budgeting, reporting and analysis.

What Does Board Do?

Board's Enterprise Planning Platform lets finance, supply chain, sales and HR teams build their own planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting applications without needing to write code. This sits within our broader Finance and ERP Technology market, where the shift has been away from disconnected spreadsheets and single purpose tools towards a shared planning environment that finance, operations and commercial teams can all work from.

The platform combines the multidimensional modelling and self service analytics that Board originally built its reputation on with dedicated planning and consolidation capability. This lets a single environment support financial planning and analysis, financial close and consolidation, and operational planning disciplines such as sales and operations planning, demand and supply planning, and workforce planning, all drawing on a common data model rather than separate systems that need reconciling.

Board has increasingly layered artificial intelligence onto this foundation. Its Board Agents provide role specific AI assistants for finance, supply chain and merchandising teams, designed to answer questions, flag anomalies and draft commentary directly inside the planning process. Board Foresight builds AI driven forecasting models that correlate a customer's own data with external economic indicators, while Board Signals brings in real time, expert curated market and trade policy information so planning teams can factor outside events into their models without manual research.

The platform is available in the cloud or on premise, and connects to common ERP, HR and demand planning systems such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Logility, so that budgets and forecasts can be built on live operational data rather than static exports.

A recurring theme across Board's customer base is the move away from spreadsheet driven planning towards a governed, auditable platform that multiple departments can work in at once. Because the underlying data model is shared, a change made in a sales forecast can flow through to a supply plan and then into the financial budget without anyone needing to re-key or reconcile numbers across separate files, which is often the specific pain point that pushes a finance team to look for an alternative to Excel in the first place.

Board Technology Areas

Board's platform spans a broad set of planning and reporting capabilities, and most customers combine several depending on which parts of the business they are trying to connect.

Financial Planning & Analysis: budgeting, forecasting, management reporting and variance analysis for the office of finance.

Financial Close, Consolidation & Reporting: statutory and management consolidation, disclosure management and IFRS reporting.

Sales & Operations Planning: demand planning, supply planning and integrated business planning that connects commercial and supply chain teams.

Retail Merchandise Financial Planning: open to buy, assortment and allocation planning built for retail and consumer goods businesses.

Sales Performance Management: quota, territory and incentive planning for commercial teams.

Workforce Planning: headcount and HR budgeting connected to the wider financial plan.

Board AI: the Board Agents, Foresight and Signals capabilities that bring generative and predictive AI into everyday planning tasks.

Board Alternatives

Board operates in a crowded enterprise planning and financial performance management market, where established platforms and newer cloud native challengers compete for the same finance transformation budgets. Board itself publishes direct comparisons against several of these on its own website, which gives a useful starting point for how the vendor positions itself against each. Buyers evaluating this category typically narrow the field based on how much of the business they want a single platform to cover, whether that is finance alone or finance connected to supply chain, sales and workforce planning as Board aims to do.

• Anaplan: one of the best known names in connected planning, with a strong presence in sales and supply chain planning as well as finance, and a large partner ecosystem for complex implementations.

• OneStream: built around a unified consolidation and planning platform with an extensible marketplace of add on solutions, and often shortlisted by finance teams prioritising financial close and consolidation.

• CCH Tagetik: part of Wolters Kluwer, with particular strength in regulatory and disclosure reporting for finance teams in regulated industries.

• Oracle Cloud EPM: a natural default for organisations already standardised on Oracle ERP and infrastructure, with broad planning and consolidation coverage.

• IBM Planning Analytics: built on IBM's long established TM1 engine, and often chosen by organisations that want a highly flexible, code light modelling environment.

If you are exploring the enterprise planning market and want to understand who else you should be considering alongside Board, the Viewpoint Analysis Longlist Builder is a good place to start. Answer a few questions about your requirements and we will come back with a comprehensive report covering all the vendors worth considering for your shortlist.

Board Customer Examples

Board publishes a large library of customer case studies on its own website, spanning manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics, retail and professional services, with global names including L'Oreal, Toyota Motor Italia and Coca-Cola featured alongside a long tail of mid-market and industrial customers. Four verified examples illustrate the range of organisations using the platform.

DENSO Europe: the automotive components group's European Aftermarket Division replaced Excel based sales planning with Board, connecting sales, supply chain and finance in one continuous planning process across 48 countries.

Ammega: the global belting solutions manufacturer, formed through a merger of two businesses, used Board to standardise financial consolidation and reporting across 72 legal entities, reporting around 20 percent time savings in data preparation.

Van Moer Logistics: the Belgian logistics provider adopted Board to replace Excel for budgeting, financial planning and ESG and carbon reporting across 40 sites, giving finance and sustainability teams a single source of truth.

DFE Pharma: the pharmaceutical excipients manufacturer used Board to unify forecasting, budgeting and reporting across multiple ERP systems, shortening its planning cycle from 16 weeks to 8 weeks.

Suggested Next Steps

Further reading. If you want to understand the wider finance and ERP technology landscape before going further with any individual vendor, the Viewpoint Analysis Finance and ERP Technology page covers the market in detail, including the different categories, key vendors and what to look for when evaluating your options.

You may also want to check out our Financial Planning and Analysis Software Options 2026 report to learn more about the area and the different vendos.

Build your initial longlist. Not sure who else you should be considering alongside Board? The Viewpoint Analysis Longlist Builder asks you a few questions about your organisation and requirements, and we come back with a comprehensive report covering all the vendors worth putting on your list. It is a straightforward way to make sure you are not missing a strong option before you start shortlisting.

Have your selected vendors come and pitch to you. Take a look at our Technology Matchmaker, where we will bring the leading technology vendors to pitch their ideas to you. It is a super quick way to learn what is on the market before shortlisting them.

Run a quick selection process. If you are ready to move to a formal evaluation, the Viewpoint Analysis 30-Day Technology Selection service takes you from a standing start to a preferred vendor decision in a single month. It combines the best of our Rapid RFI and Rapid RFP processes, and we run the whole thing for you, writing the brief, managing vendor engagement and guiding your team to a scored, defensible decision.

Speak to Viewpoint Analysis. If you would like to talk through your requirement and understand how we can help, request a call and one of our team will be in touch.