Graphite: The architecture powering what’s possible in Pigment

Pigment Graphite is the patent-pending technology that underpins the Pigment platform, enabling teams to plan without interruption, at unprecedented scale, so leaders can make decisions with the visibility, confidence, and speed needed to thrive in today’s changing world.

It allows teams to harness massive data, and apply governance and control, with real-time visibility of change as it happens. Graphite brings together three pillars that work together to do all of the above: the Elastic Engine, unified and governed data, and dynamic modeling.

Why this matters now

Teams are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of data they are expected to leverage, the speed at which they need to plan, and the depth of insights required to maintain their advantage. In an environment still reliant on spreadsheets and legacy solutions, too many organisations are forced to make compromises: limited visibility, slow scenario exploration, and misalignment across teams working from different definitions.

Decisions need to be made with an enormous breadth of data to generate the depth of understanding and nuance that creates advantage. That requires centralising data from across the business for clarity across the entire landscape, and ensuring teams share one language and a single source of truth.

But at enterprise scale this can quickly become impossible to manage, particularly as it must also be governed, with controls that ensure access is only available where allowed. Too many teams are forced to compromise the scale and volume of insights they can work with, because they can’t create and maintain models that are constantly in flux. Pigment Graphite brings these requirements together so planning stays both reliable and responsive.

How it works

Elastic Engine

The Elastic Engine is built for unlimited planning, all the time. It enables uninterrupted decision making, with no limit to your data, and compute power that ramps dynamically.

A limitation of previous technologies has been the need to load all data into memory before it can be processed. This means there is inherently a limit to the amount of data which can be loaded into memory within a single, physical machine.

Pigment has broken this paradigm so that storage and compute are separated. This means that any amount of data can be stored, without being constrained by what can be computed on a single machine. Instead, Pigment optimises I/O to multiple nodes distributed in the cloud.

As planning activity peaks, additional capacity is ramped dynamically; ensuring uninterrupted activity during the busiest times.

Pigment operates a unique approach of calculation prioritisation for concurrent processing, which means that planning remains accessible for analysis, reporting, and decision making, even while changes are happening, and while agents operate autonomously to complete the heavy-lifting analysis in the background - without the system ‘locking’ or becoming unavailable.

As organisations expand their planning footprint and increase scenario exploration, the Elastic Engine ensures performance and scale are not bottlenecks to what can be explored.

Unified, governed data

In Pigment, data is stored once and shared across all teams and processes. Security controls ensure data is only visible to those with access, and changes to data are propagated across models in real-time.

This creates a shared semantic layer for a single source of truth across the enterprise. It centralises data from across the business for clarity and alignment across the entire business, and delivers real-time visibility into what’s changing as it happens.

By establishing one shared language and a single source of truth, it brings teams together for planning, eliminating conflicting numbers and inconsistent definitions across teams. Governance ensures the right people, and the right workflows, operate with the right visibility, so trust and control scale with adoption. 

This is also what enables AI to work with full context, so insights and actions are grounded in the same governed truth as the business.

Dynamic modeling

Dynamic modeling is what enables teams to respond to change with ease. Flexible data structures, relationships, and scenarios can be created and adjusted quickly for exploration and insight. 

It supports a true reflection of the business by enabling flexible relationships that let teams understand performance from multiple angles.

Native scenarios make it possible to consider every possibility, so teams can respond quickly when conditions change - and paired with the Elastic Engine, means scenario planning is uninhibited by limited data.

This creates continuous evolution, where plans can adapt instantly as new information emerges, without losing trust in the underlying data and definitions offered by unified, governed data.

Graphite works in Pigment or via MCP

Pigment Graphite is the foundation for limitless planning, no matter where planning is being coordinated from. When planning is accessed through an MCP Server, the requirements for trust and control become even more important.

Your decisions must still be grounded in a single source of truth, with a shared semantic layer that ensures humans and AI agents operate with the same definitions. Governance must travel with the intelligence, so access is only made available where allowed. 

And you still need the flexibility to create custom analyses, scenarios and reports for every situation and consideration. Pigment Graphite ensures consistent, trusted plans - no matter how you create them.

Built for real-world planning

In reality, we know that planning too often breaks down in familiar ways: teams operate with siloed data, definitions diverge, and visibility lags behind change. Last minute changes cause hours of work, delaying decisions and creating missed opportunities for growth.

Systems can slow down at the very moments planning is most critical, forcing you to make compromises on what data can be brought in or which scenarios can be explored.

Pigment Graphite is designed to remove those constraints and unburden teams from compromises. 

It is a foundation that makes the continuous, connected planning that’s been promised - finally a reality.

If you’d like to see it in action, request a demo today.