Customized solutions offer freedom of choice.

By Itai Dzumbunu

Every business wants to predict the best possible outcomes and make informed decisions to ensure growth in the future. While many companies still use spreadsheets and manual entries for their planning initiatives, those that have moved onto an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution are finding that they can spend more time running the business and less time maintaining planning processes.

While an automated cloud application can help remove the challenges caused by disconnected spreadsheets, not to mention manual entries and processes, planning can still be a complex undertaking. It is not a stand-alone process, requiring timely and accurate data, inputs, and reports from different parts of the organisation. Each company also has unique requirements in order to ensure its planning initiatives deliver optimal business performance.

EPM planning solutions have been designed with this in mind, aligning the needs of corporate finance and operational planners around the enterprise, i.e., sales, marketing, HR, IT, and lines of business. This allows the company to spend more time focusing on new ideas and strategies to grow revenue and less time maintaining planning processes.

Best-in-class planning

One of the best features of these solutions is that they provide freedom of choice. A company can deploy a solution that meets its specific needs, either by using a pre-built planning framework, or choosing to build a tailored, customised planning application.

Whichever approach the business prefers, connecting planning processes through an EPM solution ensures that business strategy can be unified with planning, budgeting and forecasting activity for all business lines and functions. This results in a robust baseline for agile decision-making while keeping all teams collectively trying to achieve the same corporate objectives while staying focused on specific KPIs. In other words, different teams can maintain their independence while working in unison to achieve corporate success by leveraging the right data.

This not only allows the business to meet its immediate requirements and goals, but to enhance and mature its planning processes over time. When teams no longer need to collate and compare plans, collaboration flows and consensus planning can happen faster.

Flexible and scalable

Planning processes can vary across industries, and are dependent on the size and complexity of the business. Using an EPM planning tool, companies can create highly flexible and scalable solutions to suit their targeted business needs within and beyond finance. In other words, they don’t have to make an ‘all or nothing’ decision with planning.

Leveraging the skills and expertise of the right partner to ensure they get the most out of a tailored solution, organisations can quickly establish success and evolve their planning approach in a more agile manner – building on the success of each new process that they enable.

Ends