Success means placing Finance in control

I recently returned from the 11th Prophix user conference.  And, truth be told, I was inspired by how our customers – from around the world – are tapping into our product to achieve their ambitious goals.

At the same time, many of our customers shared with me a feeling of tremendous relief. You see, prior to adopting Prophix, they had been bombarded with messages that are prevalent in the industry. That message is essentially, ‘CPM cloud is good. On-premise CPM is bad.’

This false and dangerous dichotomy has been established by those who don’t truly understand the day-to-day workings of Finance departments. The misconception: on-premise software requires IT skills to implement and is therefore very expensive to adopt and maintain. In contrast, cloud-based products are simple and less expensive.

The truth of the matter is that this commonly portrayed depiction misses a key point that is essential for the success of Finance professionals: Finance needs to easily access and control whatever CPM solution is adopted. After all, only the Finance department truly understands how they use CPM software on a daily basis.

That means, if a CPM solution requires extensive IT expertise to implement it or update it, the costs of a system increase along with the reluctance to use it. That doesn’t help Finance professionals.

At the same time, Finance professionals are no better off if they cannot easily modify or shape their CPM solution because it is hosted on a multi-tenanted (i.e. shared) server. Under those conditions, Finance professionals are at the mercy of a solution that is bound to limited customer support and unpredictable pricing changes.

The fact that our customers are achieving great things with Prophix reflects a different approach – one where Finance professionals play a vital role in CPM. For Prophix, that has meant ensuring that Finance professionals can easily access and modify a solution to fit their organization’s unique needs. It also means ensuring that Finance professionals can work with a CPM solution independently of the IT department as well as quickly and easily exchange data with other systems such as their Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

For our customers, adopting Prophix’s CPM solution is an exciting journey. They start by automating annual budgets or monthly reporting. Then, Finance professionals apply it to help them tackle other finance-related challenges.

Finance professionals are using Prophix to add tremendous value to their companies. At the heart of this success is their ability to easily control and modify a CPM solution that addresses their company’s unique and ever evolving needs.

This is the Prophix approach and it continues to inspire me.