5 Ways to Make Your Data Work For You

Improving business performance

Reliable and timely data is at the foundation of a successful organization. These companies use this data to generate financial reports, forecasts, budgets and long-term strategic plans, helping them to achieve their growth targets with ease. Yet, many businesses struggle to reach this milestone, especially when they are dependent on error-prone spreadsheets.

The good news is that you can take specific actions to integrate financial & operational data into your planning processes to improve business performance. Here are 5 signs that your data is letting you down and the actions you can take to turn things around:

Challenge #1: Your finance function is dependent on spreadsheets and therefore, spend a lot of time gathering and cleaning data from across your organization. This is because your company lacks the means to automate financial and/or operational planning processes.

Solution: Consider a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution that will help you streamline and automate your financial processes, analyze data and integrate financial, operational and strategic long-term planning into your finance function.

Challenge #2: Your company is undergoing rapid growth and has restructured your organization to accommodate new processes. However, you’ve experienced a decline in productivity because you lack the data to assess the feasibility and impact of acquiring and integrating new businesses into existing operations.

Solution: Leverage financial and operational data to conduct ‘what-if’ analyses to determine the impact of different growth scenarios.

Challenge #3: Your products and services are out-of-step with your customers’ expectations, causing your customer acquisition costs to increase. You cannot accurately pinpoint your product costs and maintain profit margins and as a result, your current market share is eroding.

Solution: Use a CPM solution to calculate the overhead costs of production and personnel. Include allocation of employee wages and benefits to help determine your actual costs and outline the rates you should charge.

Challenge #4: Your organization is rolling out several uncoordinated initiatives, making it difficult to determine which products are selling well and why. This severely impacts your ability to create reliable budgets and future-focused plans.

Solution: You should take advantage of operational reporting and forecasting, which will allow you to see your organization’s performance in ‘real-time.’ This will allow you to focus on the most profitable initiatives, increasing transparency.

Challenge #5: You are struggling to fulfill staffing levels outlined in your future growth goals as the result of incomplete date regarding personnel costs.

Solution: Improve your personnel planning process by integrating qualitative (i.e. payroll grade, family status and job position) and quantitative (i.e. years of tenure, start dates and promotion dates) data into your personnel planning process.

To learn more about the capabilities of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software, visit our website.