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.

TimeXtender simplifies the BI backend!

Tell me, just how many executives, business analysts and other BI end users are excited by the deep technical knowledge and time it takes to properly develop and maintain the backend of a BI solution, namely a data warehouse, the extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and finally the cubes themselves?  But without a good backend for your BI solution, even the best dashboarding and BI/analytics solution available (i.e. TARGIT BI) will not be able to provide the information that your organization needs to for analysis and effective performance management.

TimeXtender simplifies the administration of the BI backend so that your organization can realize the value of its chosen analytics/visualization solution.

This is also part of the reason Jet Reports partnered with TimeXtender in their Jet Enterprise offering.  Read the interview with Joe Little, President of Jet Reports, here.

TARGIT BI - A proven BI solution that works!

TARGIT BI has been recently recognized in a BARC research study as the most widespread BI solution used due to ease of use and product functionality.  For a summary of the results of this study, please click here.