At a high level, one needs to bring together technology and product portfolios with the people and ecosystem partners necessary to increase business performance and minimize risk. A flexible Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution can and provide the best value for your stakeholders.
Businesses are looking at automating their processes like never before. Efficient month close, reducing budget cycles, improving planning and forecasting, and ultimately getting trusted numbers and fast insights are essential objectives of the CFO’s office.
At a high level, one needs to bring together technology and product portfolios with the people and ecosystem partners necessary to increase business performance and minimize risk. A flexible Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution ensures Integration with multiple source systems. It provides a platform that addresses complex enterprise planning, financial analysis, and modeling requirements of an organization and acts as a critical decision support system.
Excel is the most popular and preferred tool by professionals who deal with Financial information, given its Flexibility and Familiarity. But it also has inherent drawbacks concerning Data Integration, security, auditability, standardization, and scalability.
Multiple enterprise applications in the market provide a solution around Financial Consolidation, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Financial Reporting that offer process-specific functionalities with an essential database, workflow automation, and analytics. Current EPM solutions bring in many advantages that are in line with the contemporary market realities and compatible with the latest Technology landscape. On the other hand, these are comparatively rigid and lack the flexibility we have with excel for any ad-hoc analysis or financial modeling.
All major OEMs have EPM solutions – SAP BPC, Group Reporting and SAP SAC Planning, Oracle Hyperion, Oracle EPM Cloud, IBM Cognos TM1, Anaplan, OneStream, etc. These platforms can be connected to any source system and summarize the Financial data in the desired format.
Seamless Integration with diverse source systems is key to the success of an EPM solution. These may include ERP systems, Workforce Management Systems, CRM tools, and other operational data management sources. Clearly understanding the flow of data and usage of appropriate tools and connectors ensures the entire process’s efficiency.
Inputs to the EPM platforms can be through multiple sources or manual entry into the tool. Depending on the responsibilities and the roles, these inputs might have to be collected from various departments, divisions, cost centers, profit centers, entities, and individuals. EPM Solution provides a platform to collate all these inputs within the models using the above dimensions. A security matrix can be designed to ensure the right people can access appropriate information and build a controlled environment through workflows, which are generally missing in excel based solution.
Covid-19 has impacted almost every business globally, and lockdowns and self-imposed restrictions have drastically affected the Revenues. Companies are very cautious with their investments and continuously review the market conditions and strategize their plans accordingly. There is a pressing need for more frequent business performance reviews versus the Budget / Targets and dynamically formulate business decisions. With shrinking topline and Fixed Cost being constant, it can be a huge ordeal to manage the earnings’ impact. Visibility to controllable and uncontrollable costs and their regulation becomes key to stay competitive. Overall, COVID-19 has added more volatility to the entire Budgeting and Forecasting process. A flexible EPM solution empowers the leaders in quickly incorporating these frequent changes in the strategies into the systems and percolate it down for execution.
We have supported our customers to deal with these uncertainties through our highly flexible EPM solutions and innovative approaches to deal with new challenges.
Why Techwave?
We have been a leading System Integrator and frontrunner in the EPM space for almost 15 years and have multiple success stories to our credit. We’ve partnered with our customers in implementing robust tool-agnostic corporate performance management solutions, leveraging our accelerators and deep functional expertise. Techwave’ s integrated Enterprise Performance Management (iEPM) delivers market-leading solutions and applications for companies of any size to bridge the gap between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Our EPM solutions cover financial consolidation, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and integrating information from all levels of your organization and enable timely, accurate, and dependable insights into the business performance.