Business planning is a new software category. These applications enable senior executives to integrate all the plans of business units into a single, integrated view, which helps them have more accurate plans, do more insightful what-if planning, achieve greater agility in reacting to changing business and economic conditions, and execute plans in a more coordinated fashion than was possible. Business planning software is intended for CEOs and COOs, who are not well served by current capabilities. Business planning software enables executives and managers to understand both the operational and the financial consequences of their actions, but it emphasizes the things that the various parts of the business focus on: units sold, sales calls made, the number and types of employees required, customers serviced and so on. Lines of business already do this but in a fragmented fashion using desktop spreadsheets circulated within silos via email. Business planning software provides a platform to support modeling in individual business units, individual planning processes and visualization of the impacts of changes in what-if scenarios. It offers a central data repository for all plans; our benchmark research shows the advantage of this approach: Companies that directly link individual business unit data to an integrated plan get more accurate results. To be specific, 22 percent of those with such links have very accurate budgets compared to just a handful with less direct links and none that employ summarized data.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Controller,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Financial Performance Management,
financial reporting,
FPM,
Integrated Business Planning
Oracle continues to enrich the capabilities of its Hyperion suite of applications that support the finance function, but I wonder if that will be enough to sustain its market share and new generation of expectations. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld these new features were on display, and spokespeople described how the company will be transitioning its software to cloud deployment. Our 2013 Financial Performance Management Value (FPM) Index rates Oracle Hyperion a Warm vendor in my analysis, ranking eighth out of nine vendors. Our Value Index is informed by more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers and their products and how well they satisfy specific business and IT needs. We perform a detailed evaluation of product functionality and suitability-to-task as well as the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. Our assessment reflects two disparate sets of factors. On one hand, the Hyperion FPM suite offers a broad set of software that automates, streamlines and supports a range of finance department functions. It includes sophisticated analytical applications. Used to full effect, Hyperion can eliminate many manual steps and speed execution of routine work. It also can enhance accuracy, ensure tasks are completed on a timely basis, foster coordination between Finance and the rest of the organization and generate insights into corporate performance. For this, the software gets high marks.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Planning,
Social Media,
ERP,
Human Capital Management,
Modeling,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
close,
closing,
Consolidation,
Controller,
driver-based,
Finance Financial Applications Financial Close,
Hyperion,
IFRS,
Tax,
XBRL,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Oracle,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
compliance,
Data,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
benchmark,
Financial Performance Management,
financial reporting,
FPM,
GAAP,
Integrated Business Planning,
Price Optimization,
Profitability,
SEC Software
Business planning as practiced today is a relic, a process hemmed in by obsolete conceptions of what it should be. I use the term “business planning” to encompass all of the forward-looking activities in which companies routinely engage, including, for example, sales, production and head-count planning as well as budgeting. Companies need to take a fresh view of all these, adopting a new approach to business planning that while preserving continuity makes a substantial departure from what most companies do now. Currently, in most organizations the budget is the only companywide business plan. However, while necessary for financial management and control, budgets are not especially useful for running an organization.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Controller,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Financial Performance Management,
financial reporting,
FPM,
Integrated Business Planning
For the past couple of years I’ve been pointing to the importance of in-memory computing to the future of business applications. It’s an integral part of Ventana Research’s business and finance research agenda for 2013, and it’s one of the core technologies that senior executives should have an appreciation for because it can transform all core business processes, especially those that are analytic in nature.
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Topics:
Mobile,
Predictive Analytics,
Real-time,
SAP,
ERP,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CRM,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Social,
Business Suite,
Financial Performance Management,
HANA
Businesses always see a lag between when technology makes some advance possible and when a majority of companies actually adopt it. There’s even a longer lag between the emergence of an advance in a business process or technique and the time it takes to become mainstream. When we write our research agendas at the top of each year, we have to strike a balance between focusing on the new and different, which is still many years away from general acceptance, and the mainstream, which has been anticipated for so long that it almost seems passé. Our research agenda for office of finance to support business for 2013, which I just finalized, is once again an attempt to balance the leading edge and the mainstream with an eye to practical solutions.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Budgeting,
close,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Risk,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
CEO,
Financial Performance Management,
FPM
I recently started a series of blog posts on what CEOs (and for that matter, all senior corporate executives) need to know about IT. The first covered the high-level issues. As I noted there, it’s not necessary for a CEO of a company to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, CEOs must grasp the basics of IT just as they must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a high level – the technologies that support that process. This installment is about four supporting technologies that will be drive considerable change in business computing over the next five years. Each of these subjects is worthy of a chapter-length discussion or even a book; what follows is the “elevator pitch” version.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
SaaS,
Social Media,
Customer,
ERP,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Complex Event Processing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Information Management (IM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
CEO,
PaaS
The business/IT divide is a barrier that prevents most companies from achieving their true performance potential. The divide has remained a constant impediment since the dawn of business computing six decades ago. It’s not necessary for a CEO of a company to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, that CEO must master the basics of IT just as he must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a high level – the technologies that support that process. Only a handful of business schools give prospective MBAs a good grounding in the practical elements of information technology or preach the necessity of mastering an understanding of IT as they would, say, the efficient market hypothesis.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Human Capital Management,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
competition,
executive,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
CFO,
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
IT,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
CEO,
FPM
For the past several years Ventana Research has focused more on analytics and their importance to improving business performance. We’ve done extensive benchmark research in business analytics, detailing how they are used generally in business and in major functional areas of companies as well as their application in specific industries. We adopted this focus because technology advances are changing the landscape of analytics. Its use in business management, for example, is getting new scrutiny these days because of three important changes in information technology.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Planning,
Human Capital Management,
Modeling,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Customer Performance Management (CPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
best pracices,
business value,
cash management,
challenge,
financial planning
For me, the most significant announcement to come out of the recent SAPinsider conference was the company’s formal release of Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) running on HANA, SAP’s in-memory computing appliance. For me, HANA is a potential “game changer” for planning, statutory consolidation and other analytics-supported financial processes because of the substantial reduction it enables in processing time from loading to reporting. In-memory systems provide a substantial edge in speed of processing large data sets or complex calculations, whereas the latency between thought and answer in complex scenario analyses on disk-based systems often prevents a collaborative dialogue around possible situations and their potential outcomes. Today, companies have to simplify the analysis, severely limit the amount of detail or find some combination of the two. More than likely, they wind up not having a potentially valuable collaborative dialogue in activities such as weekly or monthly review and revision of operating plans and their financial consequences, closing the books or assessing the impact of pricing changes on profitability. In the case of planning, I expect that in-memory systems will enable make it easier for companies to make changes to detailed plans (such as the budget or production plans), which is difficult today for many of them.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Planning,
SAP,
Social Media,
Customer Experience,
ERP,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Budgeting,
IFRS,
XBRL,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Mobility,
Cloud Computing,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
Financial Performance Management,
GAAP,
HANA
One trend in business software that’s still in its early stages but gathering momentum is the availability of modeling tools that fill the gap between desktop spreadsheets and enterprise systems. Granted this “early stage” has been under way for quite some time, but the technology has finally progressed to the point where I expect it to get increasing market traction.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Database,
Planning,
Forecast,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Essbase,
Quantrix,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
In-memory,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
finance,
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Workforce Performance Management (WPM),
analysis,
analytical application,
business model,
business plan,
financial model
