Many Finance teams continue to employ approaches to planning, reporting, and analysis that lack the speed, flexibility, and ability to provide insight necessary to support their companies’ growth goals. To help address this challenge, Planful sponsored a webcast with CFO Magazine titled “What Finance Can Do to Help Drive Company Growth.” Featured speaker was Paul Hamerman, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
Here’s a summary of the key points made during the webcast.
In the attendee poll taken at the start of the webcast, as well as in some research cited by Paul Hamerman, “revenue growth” is the top initiative for most companies, followed by “improving customer experience.” But many Finance and performance management systems used by companies aren’t set up to support growth. They suffer from a range of things:
Mr. Hamerman then went on to highlight how organizations can meet these challenges with 5 technology-driven next practices, including dynamic planning, advanced modeling, predictive analytics, digital collaboration within applications, and aligning key Finance initiatives with growth opportunities.
Finance traditionally focuses on 3 “C’s” – Control, Compliance, and Cost Management. It must now focus on Customer as well. To enable growth, finance must do the following:
Mr. Hamerman then went on to highlight Forrester’s view of Business Technology (BT) vs. Information Technology (IT), and how BT helps companies protect and grow their revenues by winning, serving, and retaining customers. Examples of BT systems include Sales/CRM, Marketing, Customer Service, E-Commerce, Contracts, and EPM.
In his final comments, Mr. Hamerman highlighted the 5 key technology trends driving innovation – and enabling growth – in Finance. This includes the following trends:
Following Mr. Hamerman’s comments, I highlighted a few of the key reasons that companies are increasing their adoption of cloud-based Finance and EPM applications. This includes speed, autonomy from IT, faster innovation, no hardware or software to set up or upgrade, lower total cost of ownership, and increased security.
I then provided my recommendations on what companies should look for as they evaluate cloud-based EPM solutions:
I also highlighted the advantages and benefits of multi-tenant SaaS solutions over single-tenant and Planfuled solutions being positioned as “cloud” applications. Then I finished up with a couple of examples of the results customers have achieved by deploying our cloud-based EPM suite.
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