Looking for a Microsoft Enterprise Reporting Replacement?

If your organization is affected by the discontinuation of Microsoft Dynamics GP Enterprise Reporting, you should review and consider the following replacement solutions:

• Management Reporter
• Prophix CPM

The Results of Combining Operational Models with Financial Budgets

This is the final blog entry in a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts. Click here to review part 2 or part 1 respectively.

Combining operational models that link key business drivers with your financial budgets provide the following results:

• Significantly shorter budget/forecast cycles
• Facilitates market environment vs. calendar driven re-forecasting to react to quickly to changes
• Re-aligns financial planning focus
• Facilitates insight between operational tactics and the financial forecast
• Facilitates variance analysis at the operational and key driver level
• Shifts professional resource time from collecting data and maintaining spreadsheets to analysis and decision making

Please browse this autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.

How to Build Financial Budgets with Operational Models

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts.  Click here to review part 1.

So, how should you go about building financial budgets with live linkage to operational models?

• Shed disconnected, error prone and broken-linked spreadsheet models popularly referred to as 'Excel hell'
• Leverage technology to:
• Eliminate manual processes used to 'link' operational data
• Enable variance analysis at both the financial and operational model level
• Leverage manager and professional/analyst resources by having them focus on higher-value work (i.e. rather than compiling data)

Please browse this  autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.

Why Financial Budgets Need Operational Models

This is part 1 of a 3 part series on combining financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts.

So, why do financial budgets need operational models?

• Increase ability to anticipate and react to change in today’s uncertain environment where past ≠ future
• Traditional budgeting’s focus is often misplaced (i.e. focused on salaries & wages vs attracting/retaining customers and human resources)
• Key drivers link operational tactics to the expected financial results of executing on strategy, giving insight behind the budgeted numbers and facilitating variance analysis

Please browse this autodemo for an overview of Prophix CPM, a solution that can facilitate sophisticated operational modelling.

Looking for an FRx, MR, or Forecaster alternative or replacement?

For the record, I am a huge supporter of Microsoft's CPM solutions, which currently include FRx, MR and Forecaster.  While these solutions generally serve most CPM needs, there are certain CPM requirements that cannot be addressed well by these solutions.

Prophix CPM is a scalable enterprise level CPM solution that can handle 7 of these more challenging requirements:

1. Combine financial & operational models to link key business drivers to budgets & forecasts
2. Facilitate complex planning and forecasting scenarios
3. Improve reporting speed
4. Facilitate a robust workflow to help manage the budgeting cycle
5. Automate the dissemination of reports and budgeting templates
6. Fully automate and schedule administrative functions (i.e. loading of data, etc)
7. Reduce administration to facilitate more frequent forecasting and timely intervention

If you're looking for a replacement for any or all of these solutions, Prophix CPM should make the short-list. Contact me or view the autodemo for more information.

Prophix CPM

Prophix CPM is a fully integrated performance management solution that empowers organizations with budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, consolidations and personnel planning capabilities.  
 

Prophix CPM’s robust analysis functionality empowers end-user investigation with ad-hoc ‘drag and drop’ capabilities, automatic variance calculations and full drill-down to details on measures within the business model.

Prophix CPM has the ability to combine financial and operational business models, meaning that you can leverage Prophix to manage performance across your entire organization and roll these operation budgets into your financial model.  An example would be to create a project/job costing model that facilitates budgeting project costs at the operational level.  This model would then facilitate budget to actual reporting for projects and automatically update the financial budget/forecast when changes are made to any project’s budget/forecast.

Prophix CPM facilitates the automation and scheduling of administrative functions, from importing actual data to distributing Excel templates for end user contribution to distributing financial reports via email or Microsoft SharePoint.

Prophix CPM is ERP agnostic meaning that it can be used with any ERP system including any Microsoft Dynamics ERP.  It also fully integrates with TARGIT BI.

For more information contact me and/or view the Prophix CPM Product Tour.

Dilbert and Why to Not Budget using Excel

For many smaller organizations with simple budgeting/forecasting needs, Excel works just fine.  However, as Dilbert points out below, there are certainly drawbacks to using Excel:





For organizations with more complicating needs, the value of a using a dedicated CPM solution for budgeting/forecasting and financial/management reporting are myriad, including:
- Simplify and better control the budgeting process
- Reduced administration of the budgeting cycle
- Increased collaboration
- Real time version control
- Mitigate speadsheet ‘mis-calculations’ and ‘overrides’
- Better manage security
- Historical tracking/audit of changes
- Integrated financial/management reporting solution to facilitate variance reporting
- Simply reforecasting administration