Every CFO dreams of making planning one cohesive and ongoing process across the organisation, but many are still struggling to integrate financial and operational planning into a seamless ecosystem. In fact, according to a 2023 report from the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), only 26% of CFOs surveyed say their respective company’s approach to annual budgeting is valuable. 

Today’s finance leaders have started breaking down the traditional silos that have hampered them from providing actionable insight to line-of-business managers, but many organisations are still having to navigate the effects of independent plans that don’t talk to each other. If there is a separate financial plan, sales and operations plan, headcount plan, marketing plan, and even line of business plans, teams miss out on important information and opportunities that could impact their success. This leads to misalignment, duplicated effort, and missed targets.

The future lies in integrating all of these plans and budgets into one cohesive system, saving time and resources while ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goal. In today’s fast-paced business environment, organisations need the latest data for rapid decision-making. By connecting and unifying planning processes, finance teams can drive results and propel their business forward.

Growing complexity

Many organisations have embarked on their connected planning journeys, improving forecast accuracy by leveraging real-time data and advanced forecasting models. Unfortunately, this has led to its own set of challenges.

With dozens of diverse planning and finance processes, it can be difficult to get them all working together properly. Every departmental and corporate application or model must be connected, adding risk, cost and complexity to already-taxed finance teams. The sheer number of modules used by organisations, combined with third-party software to support critical financial close processes, financial data quality, reporting, and analysis makes this even more complicated.

Finance teams are also finding difficulty in dealing with the technical complexity and administrative burden of moving and reconciling data, constantly managing metadata, monitoring data latency and managing security between fragmented products or models. Not only are these challenges hampering their decision-making abilities, but the time taken to complete these tasks is slowing down their ability to drive performance.

Gaining the benefits of connected planning therefore relies upon significant co-ordination across organisational business units, processes, and platforms. EPM solutions offer a singular, authoritative data source, harmonising planning procedures to seamlessly integrate planning throughout the organisation.

The next evolution of planning

EPM provides the next level of evolution in planning, helping companies achieve a single version of the truth across all processes. With access to up-to-date information and robust predictive capabilities, EPM helps finance teams make more reliable projections, identify potential risks and opportunities, and take proactive measures to achieve better performance outcomes.

With everyone working towards the same goal, there is no room for misalignment or confusion, and Enterprise performance management solutions take connected planning to the next level by providing a complete picture of what’s going on. When all parts of the organisation are integrated, up-to-date information is easy to access, leading to better decision-making.

EPM solutions ensure that finance teams and business leaders can make quick and informed decisions, enabling the organisation to react to changes in real time and make adjustments whenever needed. When all of an organisation’s plans are on one platform, the risk of error and duplicated effort are eliminated. This leads to more accurate and reliable data, which in turn drives better results. Taking planning to the next level in this way not only helps the business become more agile, it ensures it can remain competitive in an increasingly fast-paced economic climate.

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