While corporate performance management (CPM) vendors continue to innovate and create powerful features that may not even have been requested by their customers yet, your organization most likely has to some research to do while vendors work on delivering the CPM tools that will optimize their customers’ decision-making.
Almost no companies today are close to “CPM Nirvana.” They struggle from the burden of maintaining report writers across their different systems and a lack of corporate dashboards with calibrated KPIs. This article will provide insight into some key features to anticipate from CPM tools in the future, and it will cover areas you can prepare today so that you are ready to take advantage of this functionality and to help you drive world-class decision-making across your organization.
Your Roadmap and Anticipated Future CPM Functionality
Companies won’t simply replace their old, often specialized CPM solutions with new ones as needs occur. Instead, they’ll start with a detailed analysis of what type of information, in what type of format and with what kind of support their executives as well as information workers need in order to optimize their decision-making capabilities.
Executives will put high priority on their future CPM platform project because they know that a well-planned and executed CPM implementation will function almost like an exoskeleton for the company, surrounding every decision-maker with technology to assist them in making smart decisions efficiently, just like an exoskeleton works to strengthen the speed and power of the human body.
CRM systems typically have incomplete information about campaigns, customers, leads, and opportunities. Accounting systems often have poorly filled-out chart of accounts, or have transaction entries that don’t have customer, product, or project information that you need. Data problems are almost always prevalent throughout an organization’s transaction systems. So, by understanding the importance of good, clean data today, executives can strongly support the re-implementation or purchase of new transactions systems that then will help drive extremely powerful CPM implementations in the future and that will enable world-class decision-making and resulting success.
CPM Platforms in the future
The most successful BI platforms will have all of the following characteristics:
Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL)
Your CPM solution is only as good as the data you can load into it, as well as how timely your data is. Therefore, the CPM tools of the future will increasingly offer powerful data loading functionality that is able to easily connect to the APIs of your various transaction systems and load data into the CPM solution automatically on-demand as well as on a schedule.
Business Data Warehouses
One of the reasons why organizations today are not able to give their employees great, timely, on-demand information to support good decision-making is that their data is stuck in various on-premise and cloud data sources, and each one has a separate reporting and analysis tool. This “information handicap” can be fixed by implementing a flexible business data warehouse to handle key financial and operational data. CPM platforms of the future will wipe out the need to design such data warehouses in-house.
All Inclusive, Web-based CPM Portals with Apps
As mentioned above, one of the biggest CPM issues faced today is that users need to access several reporting tools as well as compile spreadsheets to retrieve and present the data their decision-makers need. In addition to the critically important ETL and data-warehouse components, all successful CPM platforms of the future will provide a single web portal user-interface where CPM functionality or modules (“apps”) can be installed on demand.
To read more about How to Upgrade Reporting, Budgeting, Dashboards, and Data Warehouse Processes with CPM in the Future, .
