Part 1: From evaluating your needs to creating a Short List

Are your budgeting and forecasting workbooks becoming unwieldly, less reliable, and making it more challenging for you to turn around new plan scenarios?   Is achieving operationally-integrated and driver-based financial planning a top objective, but still seem like science fiction?  Would you like to better integrate your processes and data for faster reporting of financial results, variances and key performance indicators every month-end?

Shopping for a new planning and reporting solution can seem like a daunting task.  Finding time to research the options, understand the technical implications, and select the best-fit system could be a project in itself.  If you’re feeling some trepidation about ending up with a white elephant that’s expensive to implement and complex to maintain, I completely understand!

Part of what we do at Analysis Team is help our clients through the evaluation and selection of new planning solutions.  Every client has a unique set of concerns and objectives, and will approach the question a little differently.  But here are a few of the major steps that, in some form, are part of everyone’s process to make the right selection:

Do some market research – find out what customers and analysts think

There are several market research firms that follow the planning solutions market (sometimes referred to as Corporate Performance Management or Enterprise Performance Management).  These firms evaluate the vendors and their applications in depth and rate the capabilities of their solutions, based on customer feedback and investigation of the vendors’ technical capabilities and future development plans.

A few examples of market research firms that follow this segment are: Gartner, Dresner Advisory Services, BPM Partners, and Nucleus Research.  Vendors need to meet certain criteria (e.g. number of customers, among others) to be included in these studies, so only the top 12 to 15 or so vendors make the cut.  The full reports are available directly from the research firms, for a fee.

Customer survey feedback for a larger set of planning vendors is available through services like Gartner Peer Insights and TrustRadius.  They survey customers who report feedback along a range of criteria including product functionality, quality of support and training, ease of deployment and use, etc.  Customer comments are also included. Results are available for free on-line.

Understand your requirements and priorities

Understanding your own modeling and planning process requirements at the outset is important, to help you get and stay focused as you look at the options.  Take the time to do this conscientiously, as well as collaboratively with key business planners in your organization.  Your business may have particular priorities related to, for example, intricate sales planning, capital projects, workflow and control, or reporting that are above average in complexity or in some way unique.  You’ll want to be sure the solutions you consider can meet your most critical needs.

Identify data and source systems

Understand what data (including metadata) you’ll need to support your planning and reporting priorities.  What source systems will provide this data, and how can you interface these systems with your new planning system?  At a minimum, can you extract data into flat files for transfer to the solution?  If a planning application does not offer source-specific connectors, what third-party data integration tools and platforms does you company already have at its disposal?  Your IT staff will be of help in this area.

See demos

Vendors are happy to demonstrate their software’s features and functionality.  You might also find some relevant videos on-line, but be sure they are recent.  Live generic demos will give you broad overview of the capabilities of each vendor’s application and give you a chance to ask specific questions along the way.

Of course, in a vendor demo you’re seeing the best of each solution and not where it might fall short.  But a benefit is that the demos might enlighten you about some valuable functionality you haven’t yet considered or maybe didn’t know existed (especially if you’re coming from spreadsheet-based planning).  Understanding “what could be” is informative in this process.

While you’re talking to the vendors, inquire about pricing. For cloud solutions that will likely be in terms of dollars per month or year based on a number of user licenses.  Note that many vendors may offer significant discounts from their full list prices, especially if your company could be an attractive customer based on size (potential number of users) or brand recognition (to be an industry reference).  So don’t automatically toss out options that appear to be too expensive at first.

Update your requirements and priorities

Based on what you’ve learned through your investigation to date, update your requirements priority list – the functionality you need to have vs. what’s nice to have.  Your ideas may have evolved a little based on the demos you saw.  Your priority list will help you narrow down the options to a Short List, and guide you to your final selection.

Create the Short List

At this point, you have hopefully learned and seen enough to narrow down your options.  Two or three (at most four) vendors/solutions would be a good number to have on your Short List for further investigation.

 

In my next post, I will discuss how to go from your Short List to vendor selection.  Here’s to planning on better planning!