Wrong technology choice. Failed implementation. Team that can't absorb the change. The Bolt Blueprint tells you which of these risks apply to you before you find out the expensive way.
What it answers
The Blueprint doesn't start with technology. It starts with your organisation. Because in well over 200 EPM projects, we've learned that the three most common reasons mid-market implementations fail aren't technology problems. They're scoping problems, integration problems, and change management problems. The Blueprint identifies which of these apply to you.
Sometimes the answer is new software. Sometimes it's fixing your chart of accounts. Sometimes it's hiring an FP&A analyst. The Blueprint tells you which.
Not which one has the best demo. Which one fits your data complexity, your team's technical appetite, and your actual budget. We've implemented them all and can tell you what the vendor won't.
Your FP&A team is already stretched. Your IT team has a backlog. Your CFO has three other priorities. The Blueprint assesses whether your organisation is ready, where internal resistance will come from, and what needs to change first.
Not the vendor's timeline. Yours. Accounting for your data quality, your team's availability, your budget cycle, and the other projects competing for attention. We've seen enough projects to know what's realistic and what's fantasy.
The budget holder who won't give up their spreadsheet. The IT team that doesn't trust cloud platforms. The board member who got burned by the last software project. We identify the blockers and build the plan around them.
3-5 year total cost of ownership: licensing, implementation, data migration, training, ongoing admin, change management. The number you can actually take to the board, including the bits vendors conveniently leave out.
Why it matters
Most EPM projects that fail don't fail because of bad technology. They fail because of poor scoping, underestimated integrations, and teams that weren't ready for the change. These are problems that cost six figures to discover during implementation and five figures to discover before it.
Every month your team spends three days on month-end close instead of one is a month your FP&A analysts aren't doing analysis. Every board question that takes a weekend to answer is a decision made without the scenario your CFO needed. The cost of inaction is real, but the cost of the wrong action is worse.
The Blueprint catches these problems when fixing them costs thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
Pattern recognition
You've been acquired, the new owners want a board pack next month, and your team is stretched. You need clarity on what to build and in what order.
It works, sort of. But it's held together by one person, and that person is tired. You're ready to move but don't know to what.
Someone bought Anaplan (or Planful, or TM1) before you arrived. It's underperforming and you don't know whether to rescue it or replace it.
You're six months in, over budget, and losing confidence. You need someone to tell you whether to push through or cut losses.
You know you need something better. You don't know what, you don't know what it costs, and every vendor says they're the answer.
How it works
We spend time with your finance team, your IT team, and your leadership. Workshops, system walkthroughs, process mapping. We learn how work actually happens, not how it's supposed to happen. You'll need 2-3 days of stakeholder time across the week.
We review your systems, data flows, and integration points. We map current state against future state. We assess your team's readiness for change. We identify the gaps that matter and the ones that don't.
We present findings, platform recommendations, investment sizing, and a prioritised action plan. Built together, in your language, ready for your leadership. You walk away with a document you own, not a deck we own.
What you get
Current state and future state, clearly mapped. Systems, data flows, integration points, and the gaps between them.
Integration complexity, data readiness, change management risks. Scored and prioritised so you know where to focus.
Which platform fits (or whether you need one at all), with specific reasons. Not a feature matrix. A recommendation backed by experience.
Not just a cost estimate. A 3-5 year TCO that includes the bits vendors leave out: data migration, change management, ongoing admin, the training your team will actually need. The number you can put in front of your board without caveats.
Not a generic RAG status. A scored list of the specific things that could go wrong in your implementation, based on what we've seen go wrong in 200+ others. The document that turns "I think we should do this" into "I've identified the risks and here's how we mitigate them."
Not a Gantt chart. A prioritised action plan that accounts for your team's availability, your budget cycle, and your other competing projects. Built in your language, ready for your leadership team, and executable with or without us.
Your team's capacity, skills gaps, and change management needs. Where internal resistance will come from and how to handle it.
What makes it different
Vendor assessments tell you which software to buy. The Blueprint tells you whether you should buy software at all, whether your organisation can absorb the change, and what needs to happen before, during, and after implementation to make it stick.
We work across Anaplan, Pigment, Planful, IBM Planning Analytics, and several others. We've recommended against every platform we implement, including recently. Our advice is based on your requirements, not our commercial agreements.
Based on well over 200 comparable implementations, not a generic framework. We know what goes wrong at companies your size, in your industry, at your stage. We've seen the patterns and we know the fixes.
If you proceed with us, the Blueprint fee is credited against the implementation. You're not paying for a sales exercise. You're paying for a diagnostic that has standalone value either way.
About 25% of the time, the Blueprint tells clients they don't need new technology yet. Fix your processes first. Clean your data. Hire that FP&A analyst. That recommendation is worth £5,000 when it saves you six figures.
Career cover
You're about to recommend a six-figure investment to your board. The Blueprint means that recommendation comes with an independent assessment, a risk register, and a roadmap you didn't write yourself.
If the project succeeds, you chose well. If the Blueprint says don't proceed, you've saved the business from a visible failure. Either way, you've demonstrated exactly the kind of judgement your board expects.
The best thing about the Blueprint isn't the roadmap. It's that when your board asks "how do you know this is the right platform?", you don't have to say "the vendor told us." You've got an independent assessment from people who've done this 200+ times. That's not a diagnostic. That's cover.
Need help building the internal case? See our Business Case Checklist for the framework that gets EPM investment approved.
Investment
The scope scales based on complexity: number of systems, stakeholders, entities, and locations. We'll discuss your situation and provide a clear proposal before anything starts. No surprises.
If the Blueprint tells you to proceed with implementation and you choose to work with us, the £5,000 is credited against our fees. You haven't paid for a sales exercise. You've paid for a diagnostic that made the implementation faster and more likely to succeed.
If the Blueprint tells you not to proceed, that £5,000 just saved you six figures and several months. About three quarters of Blueprint clients do proceed with us. Not because they're locked in, but because they trust what we've told them and want the same people doing the work.
"Bolt's solution architecture expertise was critical to getting this right. With an organisation of our scale and complexity, we needed consultants who understood enterprise planning, not just the technology."
Questions
No sales pitch. We'll ask about your situation, your timeline, and your budget. If the Blueprint isn't the right next step, we'll tell you that too.