CPM: Achieving value by effectively anticipating and managing change

I read a very good text called Corporate Performance Management: Achieving value by effectively anticipating and managing change, published by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and written by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Oracle professionals.

They divided the text in three topics: The heart of the matter, An in–depth discussion and What this means for your business. Below is the summary of the text:

1- The heart of the matter
They started with a question: How does Corporate Performance Management (CPM) give you the right mix of standardization and flexibility to deliver predictable results and sustainable execution of your strategy?

Management systems today do a good job of budgeting, financial and management reporting, and rudimentary business intelligence analysis, but these information and process islands are usually disconnected from real-world decisions and corporate actions.

The promise of CPM is to bring together these processes and technologies into an integrated system and unified way of managing your business that is more powerful than its individual parts. A true “management system” integrates all areas of the business from a common strategy and vision, through a common business language, and establishes a culture of accountability and results.

2- An in-depth discussion
Executing your strategy is the challenge of every executive and manager in every organization; in fact, it’s everyone’s job. Add to that the challenge of day-to-day performance pressures from:
- Globalization and demographic change
- Technology advancements
- Environmental and sustainability requirements
- Disintermediation, social networks, and customer intelligence
- Commoditization and competition

Why it matters
What does this means for your business? Managing your business depends on the processes and technology being aligned to deliver the right mix of standardization and flexibility so you can:
- Believe in the numbers and report with confidence
- Set accurate expectations and anticipate results
- Deliver the right visibility to the right people at the right time, and hold them accountable for results
- Spend less time on non-value-add activities, so you can focus on what matters
- Execute with confidence and stand up to scrutiny

CPM is the glue that brings it all together
You should approach CPM with an enterprise-wide view, including finance, operations, HR, IT, sales and marketing, both functionally and at the operating level, touching all levels of the organization:
- It connects strategy, through planning, to sustained execution
- It connects people, process, technology, and data
- It’s built on connected process components including budgeting, planning & forecasting, financial consolidation, reporting & analysis, business intelligence, modeling, scorecarding, and master data management
- It’s connected with adjacencies such as GRC (governance, risk & compliance), including Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, close and consolidation, revenue growth, M & A services, cost management, operations, and many other business initiatives
- It supports the management processes of aligning strategy to plans and resource allocations, evaluating performance and understanding what actions to take, and sustaining execution including rewarding stakeholders appropriately.

How technology leads to a viable CPM strategy
CPM directly enables the five capabilities of the agile enterprise:
1. Anticipating the future and planning for business opportunities
2. Simplifying and integrating business activities so they can be analyzed for cost and value
3. Focusing on innovation within the existing boundaries of your businesses
4. Integrating new business capabilities continuously, rapidly, and cost effectively
5. Managing change through people

How to build an agile foundation for change
Agility is your new core competency. Being able to anticipate change and quickly react to it should be built-in to your company management operating system.

3- What this means for your business
Before you decide which application or applications are right for you, consider these elements:

Strategic
- Make sure you have a long-term CPM vision into which your current and short-term portfolio of finance, IT, and operational initiatives fit
- Decide where CPM “lives” in your organization: Finance, IT, Operations or a
cross-functional center of excellence
- Determine and document the business case for CPM, including:
- Revenue growth
- Cost management
- Systems rationalization
- Cash cycle velocity
- Fixed-asset utilization
- Visibility and accountability

Operational
- Connect CPM to your management system, and look at CPM processes to create competitive advantage
- Connect financial and operational models and scenarios into your planning processes
- Provide financial, operational, and predictive analytics to your business analysts and managers
- Integrate your IT roadmap with CPM
- Inventory your CPM processes and align them with your roadmap

Tactical
- Leverage your technology investments
- Rationalize systems and standardize where appropriate
- Upgrade to functionality that gives you business benefit
- Leverage your data assets
- Expose data quality issues
- Implement the CPM umbrella on-top of your transactional systems and data warehouses
- Implement a robust data governance policy and methodology

They finished with: "An integrated CPM system, the backbone of your management operating system, is the foundation for building an agile enterprise."