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What is the difference between corporate performance management software and business performance management software?
Before they can delve into functionality, buyers shopping for a corporate performance management (CPM) system must often contend with confusing terminology. That's because CPM is also commonly referred to as business performance management (BPM) and enterprise performance management (EPM) among other acronyms. In keeping with a solution market whose vendors tout the importance of a single version of the truth, here is an essential truth concerning these acronyms:
CPM=BPM=EPM
That's right, each of those acronyms and the phrases they represent refer to the same set of solutions. The confusion around terminology is not new, take it from KCI Computing. We've been operating in the business of monitoring and managing enterprise performance for 30 years. Since 1977, our mission has been to develop and deliver a single unified software solution that brings together financial and operational data from numerous, disparate sources and applications into one comprehensive enterprise view of the business for value-added planning, analysis, and reporting purposes.
Alas, our true mission is a bit too long and detailed to fit into tidy acronyms, which we've seen come and go over the past three decades. The gray-hairs among us will recall the days of executive information systems (EIS). And the youngsters among us will no doubt see these solutions referred to with an entirely new set of terms 10 years down the road.
That said, we believe CPM presently works just fine as a general description of our performance management solution, which helps companies meet their strategic planning/modeling, budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, reporting and analysis challenges. We also believe that BPM and EPM are also fine acronyms that describe the same type of solution. On both points, point, we're happy to find ourselves in agreement with one of our market's most respected observers and also with one of its funniest observers.
"In the performance management world, most consultants, analysts and vendors have settled on calling the category business performance management (BPM), corporate performance management (CPM) or enterprise performance management (EPM)," writes BPM Partners President and CEO Craig Schiff in DM Review. "They basically mean the same thing – processes, content and technologies that support budgeting and planning, consolidation, reporting, KPIs, scorecards/dashboards and operational analytics."
Humorist Dan Danbom, writing in BPM Magazine, echoes Schiff's point. "At the rate they're multiplying, acronyms will probably monopolize all speech within my lifetime," Danbom writes. "Soon the only question will be which to use when — which brings us back to the BPM (business performance management), CPM (corporate performance management), EPM (enterprise performance management) debate. All three describe the same thing. As long as we agree on that, I think we'll be OK."
As long as sellers remember to focus on problems and solutions, rather than on terms and acronyms, the buyer's ultimate purchase has a better chance of turning out OK, too.
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What
differentiates CONTROL®?
CONTROL
is a cost effective, highly scaleable, one-stop tool for
every aspect of financial management — modeling, budgeting,
forecasting, analysis, consolidating and reporting. Unlike
other products that combine various components or tools,
CONTROL was developed from scratch, and architected
from the ground up, with comprehensive, end-to-end financial
management capabilities.
It is a holistic solution
that provides:
- One homogeneous
user interface
- One common meta
data and data repository
- One cohesive "real-time"
calculation engine
- One point of maintenance
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and the breadth and depth
of functionality for real time cross-functional integration
and granularity.
CONTROL empowers you to see the big picture, examine
the finite detail, continually plan, adjust and predict
with greater confidence and ease.
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Who
in my organization will benefit from CONTROL?
Your entire organization
stands to benefit from using CONTROL, from finance
to IT, from the CEO to line managers. Because CONTROL…
- Supports and integrates
all financial management processes—budgeting,
planning forecasting, modeling, consolidating, and
reporting and analysis—across your enterprise
- Automatically assimilates
and handles very large amounts of data from your
operational and financial systems
- Increases end-user
participation and enterprise collaboration yet reduces
cycle times
- Enables core metrics
for profitability and performance to be tracked
consistently and accurately
- Delivers the perceptiveness
and agility needed for effective decision making
- Provides unlimited,
dynamic "what if" capabilities without
any IT intervention
- Allows rapid model
development and quick and easy altering as the business
evolves
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What
is CONTROL's format for planning, reporting and analysis?
CONTROL
uses Microsoft Excel™ as its main user interface
(it also provides a web-based interface). Having the power
of CONTROL integrated with Excel allows you
to:
- Rapidly deploy CONTROL
- Minimize the learning
and acceptance curve
- Leverage existing
spreadsheets to quickly update CONTROL to
plan or forecast data
- Maintain the look
and feel of existing output
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How
will CONTROL increase efficiency and streamline my
overall financial processes?
CONTROL
eliminates the constraints and heartaches of spreadsheets
and disparate applications and systems. With CONTROL
there is:
- No need for a myriad
of tools and applications
- No need to reconcile
and synchronize multiple, incongruent applications
- No need to re-key
data
- No need for manual
links and consolidations
- No delays in retrieving
urgent and critical information
- No different versions
of the "financial truth"
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It intergrates all financial
management processes and functions and provides a single authoritative
source of information for accelerated and improved decision-making.
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How
does CONTROL integrate data from my existing enterprise
and other legacy systems to give me real-time, cross-functional
data access?
CONTROL does not rely
on proprietary database technology or interim reporting
"cubes" to generate data for reporting and analysis.
Instead, CONTROL uses a "dynamic mapping"
concept to extract and integrate financial and non-financial
data from a broad range of operational and financial sources
including general ledgers, ERPs, legacy systems, data warehouses,
and data stores etc.
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Which
databases does CONTROL support, and are there other
technical requirements?
CONTROL
is designed to leverage your company's existing infrastructure
and systems. It stores its metadata (dimensions, levels,
hierarchies, attributes, and data measures) and data in
an industry-standard RDBMS, such as Oracle, MS SQL Server,
DB2/400, Informix, Sybase, etc., features an n-tier client/server
architecture, full Internet support, and drill through to
transactional level detail. Hardware requirements vary by
deployment strategy and the size and complexity of the application.
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Will
I still be able to use my existing spreadsheet models?
Yes, CONTROL
enables you to leverage the investment you made in Excel.
As a matter of fact, you can:
- Use your spreadsheets
to automatically build CONTROL metadata
(dimensions, levels, hierarchies, etc.)
- Update plan or forecast
data in a CONTROL model directly from your
spreadsheets
- Add personal calculations
- Maintain the look and
feel of your spreadsheet reports
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How
does CONTROL work?
CONTROL
has three main components: user interface, processing engine,
and relational database, of your choice.
- The user interface,
implemented as an Excel add-in, seamlessly extends
the power of Excel with all of the functional power
of CONTROL. The second, easy-to-use user
interface offers a subset of CONTROL's
capabilities and is delivered via a standard web
browser.
- At the heart of
CONTROL is a dynamic processing engine implemented
as a series of objects each with its own public
properties and methods. The engine exposes these
properties and methods using Microsoft COM or DCOM.
Because these core capabilities are implemented
in one place, they can be shared by both our Excel
based and web user interfaces.
- All CONTROL
data is stored in normalized structures within the
standard ODBC-compliant relational database (e.g.,
Oracle, SQL Server and DB2) of choice. This allows
us to take advantage of the inherent capabilities
of these systems (e.g., scalability, backup and
recovery and atomic updates), ensures its accessibility
to the wide range of tools available with each database
and facilitates systems management.
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What
are the benefits of a native Microsoft Excel environment?
We chose to implement
CONTROL's primary user interface in Excel
because it is the tool of choice for our user community.
Wherever possible, we designed CONTROL's functionality
to work consistently and similarly to Excel features, both
to leverage the incredible power of Excel and minimize training
time.
Since both CONTROL's
user interface and processing engine are based on leading-edge
Microsoft technology (e.g., MS Office, COM, DCOM and IIS)
we can deliver new functionality quickly and our users can
take advantage of the continuous advances in technology
and reduced cost of ownership provided by Microsoft.
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How
many users can CONTROL handle?
CONTROL
is enormously scalable. It
imposes no inherent restriction on the number of users.
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What
about security?
CONTROL
provides robust user and data security, including granular
access CONTROLs. Users can be restricted or permitted
access to specifically authorized models—and restricted
within each model to designated scenarios, organizational
entities, and variables—on a no-access, read-only access
or read-write access basis.
In addition, security
privileges can be assigned to individual users or to groups
of users for easy administration; and user passwords can
be set to expire periodically, after extended periods of
inactivity, or after a specified number of invalid login
attempts.
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Is
CONTROL Web-enabled?
Yes, CONTROL's
intuitive Web interface supports:
- Budget and forecast
data collection and aggregation—in real time
- Distribution of
up-to-the-minute performance reports across the
enterprise
- Real-time multidimensional
analysis
- Data exploration
including drill-through
- Dynamic anytime,
anywhere access and collaboration
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Best of all, data and comments
entered via the web interface are automatically and instantly
available via the Excel-based interface, and vice versa. There
is no process to manage, no system adminisration and no consolidation
to run.
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Is
CONTROL an industry-specific application?
On the contrary,
CONTROL is a cross-industry application. Customers
representing every major industry—from banks, to manufacturers,
to defense contractors—and ranging from mid-sized to
large, diversified Fortune 100 companies, benefit from CONTROL.
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How
much does CONTROL cost?
For the depth
and breadth of its functionality, CONTROL
is incredibly well priced. Licensing fees vary, depending
upon your company's underlying database, number of servers,
and type and number of users.
What’s more, CONTROL can be deployed
in a fraction of the time and cost of other solutions and
can be administered by non-technical, non-IS personnel.
Plus, it's the only
tool you need to manage, measure, understand, optimize and
predict financial performance.
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How
long does it take to implement CONTROL?
Implementation
times vary depending upon the requirements, the number and
quality of data sources, number of users, etc. We've had
CONTROL applications up and running in a few
days; other implementations have taken a few months. Working
on-site as required, our seasoned consultants can handle
the entire implementation project, or simply provide specialized
help at critical stages along the way.
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What
services will KCI provide to make sure I get the most out
of my investment in CONTROL?
We provide a
full range of services for all phases of the product lifecycle,
from startup and initial implementation through ongoing
application management and enhancement:
- Application Consulting
- Technical Consulting
- Technical Support
- Software Customization
- Training
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Whether it's consulting,
training, technical support, or custom development, we go
the extra mile to ensure you're getting the most out of
CONTROL and an on-going return on investment.
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