4 C’s to Keep in Mind When Choosing CPM Software

Exploring the Right CPM Software for Active Planning

Today’s business moves at lightning speed, and it’s up to finance professionals to help their company get ahead. To be successful, the focus of your job must shift from operational to strategic, from generating budgets to sharing data-driven insights with key stakeholders.

Your current financial planning processes and tools may be holding you back, however. Instead of envisioning future growth, you’re bogged down in rigid models, outdated plans, and hard-to-use software. That’s where corporate performance management (CPM) software comes in. The right CPM software can transform your financial operations into a tool for driving the business forward.

When evaluating the many CPM options available, remember that it’s important to keep the end goals in mind. The best CPM software will replace static financial planning that inhibits growth with an active planning process that becomes a significant advantage to your company’s success.

The 3 Cs of active planning

The CPM software you select should embrace the three aspects of active planning:

1. Collaborative: Planning is no longer just a financial process. You want to work with your business partners and get their input and buy-in to plans. For this, a CPM software has to be easy for both finance and business users to learn and work with.
2. Comprehensive: You need robust models to forecast future performance that’s driven by data and insights generated from that data. Your CPM software should be powerful enough to build these rich, complex models based on real and accurate business data.
3. Continuous: While an annual plan is a useful guidepost, you need to manage business performance, planning, and forecasting on an ongoing basis. Choose a CPM software that has fast modeling capabilities and that is fast to adapt to change.

The fourth C: CPM in the cloud

When evaluating CPM software, consider one that takes advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud.

When evaluating CPM software, consider one that takes advantage of the scalability and flexibility of the cloud. With cloud corporate performance software, you get regularly scheduled product updates, centralized data, intuitive reporting, and straightforward integration with many other applications. It simplifies the way you obtain and work with data, giving you plans, models, and workflows that anyone in the organization can use to make timely, data-driven decisions.

In addition, data visibility is unmatched in the cloud, with dashboards that provide a window into metrics, analytics, and business intelligence. You get the ability to react in real time to changes and dynamically update your forecasts for these new conditions and requirements so you are always ahead of the curve on managing your organization's performance.