Pacific College of Health and Science majors in Pigment

At a glance

• PCHS were struggling with the weight of manual, complex planning processes that lived in Excel
• They engaged Pigment to accelerate board reporting, monthly close, improve insight into business operations, and enable scenario planning
• Stakeholder feedback has been extremely positive and PCHS are looking to roll out further Pigment use cases

Pacific College of Health and Science (PCHS) is a multi-site higher education institution operating in a competitive market with complex tuition dynamics, program mix decisions, and capital investment considerations. 

As the organization has grown, leadership needed a modern business planning environment that could keep pace with the business and help leaders answer questions quickly and confidently.

The challenge: Scaling manual processes

Before Pigment, financial planning and forecasting cycles required significant time and coordination, and the monthly close and forecast rhythm was slowed by manual work. The finance team said they felt like they were ‘using an abacus’, and that adding more people to their processes was doing nothing to fix the problem.

Key challenges for PCHS included:

• Slow, labor-intensive planning and forecasting cycles
• Difficulty accelerating the monthly close and monthly forecast cadence
• Board reporting that relied on manual assembly and spreadsheet-heavy workflows
• Limited ability to model “what if” scenarios quickly, especially around capital investments

In short, PCHS needed a platform that could carry more of the heavy lifting so the team could spend more time on high value work.

Why Pigment?

PCHS first learned about PlanSimpli through a strategic partner, and PlanSimpli introduced Pigment. During the evaluation process, they reviewed multiple planning solutions, including OneStream.

What stood out about Pigment was not simply that it checked boxes, but that it represented an entirely different way to operate.

Pigment delivered what PCHS was looking for:

• Flexibility to model the business the way it actually works, not the way spreadsheets force it to work
• A modern user experience that lowers friction and encourages adoption
• Speed to insight, helping a lean team answer questions faster
• A platform feel, not a patchwork of workbooks

PCHS described it as powerful enough for enterprise planning, but intuitive enough that the team weren’t burdened by feeling they’d completely reinvented their ways of working.

The results

The implementation has been a resounding success.

Pigment is the engine for board reporting

PCHS now uses Pigment to support board meeting financials and reporting. Instead of manually building board materials through spreadsheet handoffs, Pigment makes reporting repeatable, structured, and easy to refresh as assumptions change.

Faster monthly close and a more sustainable forecast rhythm

PCHS’s near-term focus is accelerating the monthly close and strengthening the monthly forecast cadence. With Pigment, they are reducing manual steps and building a more repeatable process that supports continuous forecasting.

The goal is not just faster output. It is faster confidence, and fewer “spreadsheet surprises” hiding in a tab nobody wants to open.

Curious how Pigment streamlines budgeting, forecasting, and reporting for FP&A teams? Watch our product demo to see the platform in action.

Insight into tuition, programs, and investments

Pigment is helping PCHS move beyond high-level totals into driver-based understanding, including:

• Tuition patterns by key geographies
• Performance by key programs
• Planning around capital investments tied to multi-site operations

This shift enables leadership conversations that are more forward-looking and specific, rather than post-mortems on last month’s variance.

Scenario planning for high-impact decisions

PCHS is using Pigment for scenario analysis, particularly around capital investments in onsite schools where staffing, buildout, and operational ramp have meaningful financial impact.

Pigment allows teams to model alternatives quickly, pressure-test assumptions, and make tradeoffs visible. The value is simple: better decisions, made earlier, with fewer blind spots.

Want to see how AI can further enhance your scenario planning process? Read our guide on how to use AI for scenario planning and discover how finance teams can accelerate modeling, uncover deeper insights, and make more confident decisions. 

Adoption and stakeholder feedback

Early feedback on Pigment has been very positive, with stakeholders calling it highly user friendly. While Pigment has not yet been rolled out to every leader, PCHS expects broader adoption will further engage leaders and distribute planning ownership across functions.

When leaders can explore the numbers themselves, finance stops being the reporting factory and becomes the strategy partner.

What’s next?

PCHS sees Pigment as a long-term foundation, with a roadmap to expand use cases over time. Their vision includes:

• Broader leader enablement and accountability through self-service access
• Continued enhancement of forecasting and decision support
• Leveraging historical performance to model future growth and potential expansion

PSCHS don’t want a tool that produces a budget once a year. They want a system that’s valuable year-round - and that’s what Pigment is delivering.

Implementation partner: PlanSimpli

Pacific worked with PlanSimpli as their trusted implementation partner for Pigment. PlanSimpli helped drive a skilled delivery approach grounded in transparency, including:

• Straight, practical guidance on what Pigment could do well and where boundaries were
• Close coordination across customer stakeholders and the Pigment team
• A train-the-trainer enablement model and a measured rollout designed to sustain adoption

PlanSimpli’s role was to ensure Pigment delivered value quickly while building internal capability at Pacific so the platform could expand across new use cases over time and grow with PCHS.

If you’d like to learn more about how PlanSimpli can help you scale your organization’s planning with Pigment, contact them here!