Corporate Performance Management
What is corporate performance management?
Corporate performance management (CPM), also known as business performance management or enterprise performance management, is best described by leading analyst firm Gartner Research:
“CPM is an umbrella term that describes the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise. Applications that enable CPM translate strategically focused information to operational plans and send aggregated results. These applications are also integrated into many elements of the planning and control cycle, or they address BAM or customer relationship optimization needs. CPM must be supported by a suite of analytical applications that provide the functionality to support these processes, methodologies and metrics.”
Corporate Performance Management can be further divided into solutions that deliver Strategic Corporate Performance Management and Financial Corporate Performance Management.
Strategic Corporate Performance Management (SCPM)
SCPM refers to a CPM solution’s ability to support the Office of Finance in managing organizational performance and strategy.
SCPM solutions offer the following functions and benefits:
- Financial budgets and plans
- Complex financial budgets and plans
- Integrated financial planning, modeling and analytics
- Integration
- Ease of implementation
- Ease of use
- Ease of maintenance and upgrades
- Support and vendor satisfaction
- Enterprise scalability
Financial Corporate Performance Management (FCPM)
FCPM refers to a CPM solution’s ability to support the Office of Finance in the financial close and controlling the accounting cycle.
FCPM solutions offer the following functions and benefits:
- Medium complexity FCPM
- Complex FCPM
- Process analytics
- Cloud capability
- Ease of implementation
- Ease of use
- Ease of maintenance/upgrade
- Support and vendor satisfaction
- Enterprise scalability
- Integration
Read more about FCPM and SCPM and see how CPM solutions measure up in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPM, 2018.
When is a corporate performance management solution needed?
Any company that meets the following criteria should invest in a corporate performance solution:
- Your corporate goals include growth and profitability.
- Your corporate goals include local or global expansion or M&A.
- Your company wants to keep financial insights at the core of both financial and strategic decisions.
- Your Office of Finance is inundated with menial tasks, instead of business analysis.
- Your Office of Finance is suffering from the effects of siloed financial processes like budgeting, planning, consolidation, and reporting.
- You’re finding errors in reports and disclosure documents.
- Manual data entry and timely calculations are reducing productivity and making for late nights or even missed deadlines.
- Collaboration between teams causes bottlenecks or miscommunications.
- Incorrect information proliferates across your organization.
- You have no way of slicing or drilling into data to generate performance insights.
Why is corporate performance management important?
The importance of management to corporate performance is that through when CPM is completed in a single, unified environment using a single version of data, all contributors, reports, plans, disclosure documents, departments and LoBs are on the same page, with finance at the core of strategic decisions.
Corporate performance management keeps financial performance at the heart of all decisions and strategy.
Corporate performance management puts finance in the driver’s seat. Business decisions are then made with a picture of true profitability and costs. When you access the truth of your organization’s financial performance, you might choose a different course of action than you would if you were uninformed. When executive management can see how financial information relates and impacts different departments, LoBs, branches, etc., every decision is made with a 360 degree view of impacts in mind.
Corporate performance management solutions improves efficiency.
Corporate performance management solutions are built to help you see performance, execute financial processes and report on performance data, faster. Data collection, close, consolidation, reporting and analysis are all time consuming endeavours when completed manually. Not to mention, erroneous, especially when these processes require a lot of human effort. CPM gives users the automated tools to expedite their work, so that they can spend more time on analysis.
Corporate performance management aligns all LoBs, departments, branches, and divisions.
With performance data at every level of granularity, CPM software solutions gives users the ability to identify underlying trends in data, and see the impacts of business decisions across the organization.
Corporate performance management controls risk.
When you can see your performance, you can see your shortcomings and identify financial risks. Tools like dashboards and automated reports help management identify risks and respond faster and with more information.
Corporate performance management can result in:
- Automating over 50% of manual entries.
- Reduce consolidation, planning and reporting time by over 35%.
- Increased efficiency and cut overall costs by over 20%.
How to improve corporate performance management:
- Deploy a single CPM solution across your entire organization.
- Use a single CPM solution to manage all financial processes, from close to disclosure.
- Connect all applications and systems that house performance data to a single data source.
What should you look for in a corporate performance management solution?
When you’re looking to purchase a corporate performance management solution, look for:
- A unified solution. Not: a stacked or cube system.
- A single version of the truth across all financial processes, from close to disclosure. Not: data exports every time you consolidation data.
- The ability to run multiple consolidations simultaneously. Not: one consolidation at a time.
- Data and reporting controls owned by the Office of Finance. Not: IT owned processes.
- Easy implementation. Not: an implementation that disrupts your existing processes.
- Configuration. Not: customization or custom scripting.
- Inter-system collaboration where multiple people can work in the same document simultaneously, without risk of overlap. Not: numerous contributors working in different versions of a single document.
- Ease of use with native Microsoft integration. Not: Excel-like features.