With increasing competitive pressures and commoditization attacking your company’s top line, to sustain and grow profitability it’s critical to find opportunities to reduce the costs of making your products and delivering your services. As a decision-maker in a large or complex organization, you realize that having a clear picture of the profitability of each product or service is challenging, but important for determining the right strategic direction and the best tactical decisions.

Oracle’s Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) is a software that enables you to understand the drivers of cost and profitability. (more…)

If your company’s fiscal year has just begun, congratulations on getting through your annual planning process and finalizing your budget for the new year! With the stress and hard work (and hopefully board approval as well) behind you, it’s worth a little celebrating … or maybe a lot of celebrating if you need to numb the pain a little.

From my own FP&A experience, I know how it can be – long days and nights (and maybe weekends), late demands for revisions, broken spreadsheet links, feeling like a zombie by the time final presentations come around. After all that, I’ve felt like enjoying an extra glass or two of champagne – or something stronger. (more…)

[A Strategic View of BI & EPM – Part 6 of 6]

Your organization has put significant time and budget into implementing BI and EPM solutions. You are now seeing the fruits of your efforts with an improved financial planning system, more timely views of sales channel profitability, deeper analysis of supply chain performance, or more relevant visualization of key indicators for senior management. How do you best support the platforms and solutions you’ve deployed, so that you continue to derive benefit into the future as business needs and technologies evolve?

A well-trained system administrator working closely with business users and an IT organization that assures networks run and data flows are basic for keeping the lights on day to day. (more…)

After the pain of your last budget cycle (or as you experience the pain of the cycle you’re currently in), you may be considering new software to help things go more smoothly the next time around. But while you’re thinking about a software upgrade you should also consider how to improve the planning process to make it more effective and relevant, not just faster and easier.

As a Finance manager once told me, “Automating the current bad process only enables us to make the same mistakes faster.” Planning is the means by which corporate strategies and goals drive operational decisions and actions, improving financial outcomes. How can improving the process help make that a reality? (more…)

Fashion moves fast, and fashion retailers need to be nimble to keep up with trends and manage profit targets. While the designers and merchandisers are focused on delivering what customers want to wear, how do you watch and grow the bottom line?

Our client knew they had opportunity to improve overall margins but decision-makers lacked access to complete information to drive timely decisions. Senior management’s objectives were to produce more of the styles consumers want, in quantities better aligned with demand, at lower cost. With 500,000 styles made by third-party suppliers around the world and designs changing by the season, a significant amount of data was being generated however systems and processes couldn’t keep up. (more…)

When Essbase came on the market back in the early 1990s (originally developed by Arbor Software), few of us expected the application to remain so popular for this long. Over a short period of time the majority of the Fortune 1000 adopted it. Well over 20 years later (and since becoming Hyperion Essbase and eventually Oracle Essbase) what keeps it so popular, and so useful?

The second half of the 1980’s saw the rise of spreadsheets, and Microsoft Excel became the crucial tool in Finance departments for analysis, reporting, planning and “what-iffing.” The concept of Essbase came from imagining a spreadsheet being capable of going beyond two dimensions (columns and rows), to as many dimensions as needed to describe your data – for example by product, department, customer, time period, and so on. In fact, the “Ess” in the name is from “Extended Spreadsheet.” (more…)

At their recent Global BI Summit, market research firm Gartner presented their vision of “Analytics and the Office of Finance” and introduced the concept of Strategic Performance Reporting. As the next level of analytics and reporting, Strategic Performance Reporting replaces the traditional monthly snapshot P&L and Balance Sheet package with a collaborative environment where Finance works together with functional business groups to understand and present the story behind the results. It contains meaningful visualizations and analytic drill-down. In order to tell the story of performance, reports include operational detail and narratives that explain what happened.

In this article I would like to introduce CXO-Cockpit, software designed around the concept of Strategic Performance Reporting. (more…)

[A Strategic View of BI & EPM – Part 5 of 6]

Each year, your company determines goals for the following year and beyond. An updated long-range plan and next year’s budget define your performance targets, which are then summarized into specific metrics intended to focus management, drive decisions and compare results.

High level metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are defined by senior management as statistics related to growth in revenue or margin, market share or new markets served, client satisfaction, profitability by region and product line, employee productivity, or any other priority area of business performance. (more…)

Remember when Apple’s iPhone stormed onto the market? As a smartphone it was a break-through technology and a very complex instrument. Yet its user interface made it very easy to learn and use, and its value quickly made it a product most people can’t live without. Proof of the iPhone’s success could be seen in the product’s phenomenal adoption rate and sales curve.

Modern BI and EPM technology is also very powerful and offers an increasing array of capabilities. But with that power comes a risk: The implementation specialists configuring your solution might be so fascinated by all the latest cool features that the result could be an “over-engineered” application that’s confusing to your users and hard to maintain. Overly complex solutions reduce efficiency and don’t deliver business value to the fullest potential. (more…)

[A Strategic View of BI & EPM – Part 4 of 6]

Are you part of an organization that is large and complex enough that delivering reliable and actionable information requires various processes to access, validate and transform data before it is usable?  If you answered “yes”, then an organized effort for Data Governance and Master Data Management are important for you to ensure data integrity, quality and accessibility.

In a recent Analysis Team blog post How Good Master Data is Fundamental for Great Analytics we explored why good Master Data is critical to enable high-impact analytics and reporting.  In this article we consider why Data Governance and Master Data Management are essential to maintain those capabilities at an effective level. (more…)