How Corporate Performance Management Ensures More Accurate Budgeting and Forecasting

Corporate Performance Management solutions (or CPM) are tools that are used to monitor the performance of an organization. It is an extension of business intelligence that goes beyond reporting. These tools provide mobility, flexibility, and integration with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and are easy to use.

Traditionally, CPM systems were used for financial planning and budgeting and now have extended to include:

• Financial, statutory, and management reporting
• Financial Consolidation
• Strategic Planning
• and Business Modeling

The primary benefit of a corporate performance management (CPM) system is that it links high level business strategy to specific operational performance results making it easier for organizations to control and manage growth. The availability of cloud based CPM solutions offers opportunities for mid-market organizations to benefit from solutions usually only available to larger firms.

Even if firms started out using CPM only for financial planning and budgeting they would see great benefits. Here a just a few:

• With the drag and drop capabilities of products like Adaptive Insights budgeting and forecasting cycle times can be reduced by 90%.
• Many firms still use spreadsheets for their budgeting efforts which are prone to errors from bad formulas and data entry mistakes. Cloud based CPM that is integrated to your ERP system eliminate the need for time consuming data entry thereby reducing errors and improving accuracy resulting in better, faster, and more informed business decisions.
• CPM also makes it easy to submit, approve, and reject plans. Work flow capabilities provide the ability to control who can modify plan data and uses group level approvals in multi-departmental firms with complex organizational structures. This provides visibility into approval status across the entire organization.
• Plan at the required level of detail no matter how granular. Business models can include the appropriate detail that roll up to a summary level expected by corporate management. This provides a higher level of analysis that can better be used to manage corporate performance.
• Dashboards show graphical representations of key performance indicators making it easier and faster to review important metrics.

Mid-market firms now have a greater advantage than they have in the past. Cloud based corporate performance management solutions are more affordable, easier to implement and use, and provide better functionality that ever before. These tools make it an imperative to reconsider how you manage your budgeting and forecasting efforts. If you are still using old style spreadsheets, you will not remain competitive in the new world of CPM solutions.

Looking for more information about how to improve your corporate performance management? Contact Business Solution Partners to speak to an implementation expert today!