Creating an effective and reliable funnel to direct data from enterprise applications into governance, risk and compliance, performance management, and analytics offers immense benefits in today’s data-rich world. If the insights are pulling from a single, real-time set of data, immense opportunities for sound decision making are created.
“The goal is full business visibility,” says Paul Bouchier, Sales Director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner. “This can be achieved with modern Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management (d/EPM) tools that offer integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, and scenarios.”
Importantly, digital transformation drives constant change, an onslaught of new technologies, and many opportunities throughout the organisation. With the right tools making sense of the right data for the right department, finance can make the most of the advantages that come with digitisation – rather than falling behind.
Bouchier offers four key features that sound d/EPM solutions offer, highlighting the benefits of each. Firstly, advanced budgeting and forecasting capabilities effectively simplify the budgeting process. “With a planning solution, budgets and actuals are brought together. Designed according to financial best practices, modern solutions provide a great user experience and are tightly integrated with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications.”
Secondly, dynamic EPM solutions offer enhanced financial consolidation capabilities, allowing users to consolidate multiple sets of books quickly and seamlessly (even from different legal entities). “With features that simplify the tasks associated with consolidation, users are empowered to spend more time on financial reporting and analysis while easily collecting, consolidating, and reporting accurate data from operating units world-wide,” adds Bouchier.
The third feature that Bouchier notes is improved sales planning and forecasting. He believes that the integrated sales forecasting and planning tool within d/EPM brings finance and operational teams together to create accurate sales forecasts that are tied to budgets and plans. “This empowers teams to access detailed sales data and aggregated values for budgets, while creating flexible rules for discounts and drivers-based calculations, and exploring what-if scenarios and versions.”
Lastly, the ability to create sound capital expense planning and project forecasts offers the opportunity to manage projects and investments effectively, improving funding management and distribution. “This feature gives users the power to take advantage of a unified and integrated process embedded in a single workflow, clear analysis of the impact investments will have on cash flow, and integrate with ERP,” concludes Bouchier.
Issued by Perfect Word Consulting (Pty) Ltd
For more information, contact perfectword@trinitas.co.za
