EPM enables organizations to prepare and adapt their future finance function as its role evolves from bookkeeper to business partner. Advancements in data, reporting, analytics and processes are critical in driving this change.
Data diet
Organizations need well governed, good quality data to accurately report their progress and ensure their plans, budgets and forecasts are realistic. Data will be governed by the FDO (finance data officer) and treated as an asset. It will be complete, accurate, timely, easily accessible and clearly and consistently defined. Data will also be extracted in real time from multiple systems and published straight into an advanced visual dashboard
Reporting and predictive analytics
Reporting will leverage the right technology and tools to power data enabling, event-driven, automated and self-service reporting. Pre-determined reports will have increased depth and dimensionality and will allow users to self serve through drill-down as required (within approved governance). Reporting will leverage whatif analysis scenario generation capabilities and can be accessed by multiple users through various channels
A forward looking process
Planning, budgeting and forecasting will remain to be three distinct processes Technology, data and processes will deliver varied objectives Planning and forecasting will disconnect from the solar cycle to become more event-driven Finance business partnering activities will heavily utilize machine learning forecasting, robo-business partnering and natural language generation
