Zen and the Art of CPM

Design a Balanced CPM Solution

Zen is about balance; Good & Bad, Up & Down, Yin & Yang, Light & Dark, Marvel & DC; and so is Corporate Performance Management. Balance is imperative to strike when we design the business processes and automation solution to meet an organization’s needs for corporate performance management.

At Prophix when we work with our clients, all clients regardless of size, complexity or industry, we use our four guiding principles to design a CPM solution that balances:

• Maximizing user adoption,
• Creating end user functionality that is intuitive and efficient
• Performance of the application, and
• Maintenance of the solution over time

This generally means phasing in the use of Prophix for the budget cycle so in many case this means ensuring the final budget is in Prophix albeit some of the data for that budget is still maintained in Excel. This approach has been successful at our clients because it allows for the creation of one source of truth for the budget while minimizing change management for some of the downstream work. Over time our clients add to the budget components maintained in Prophix, while often keeping some parts in Excel, as this maintains efficient processes.

“Build it and they will come” for CPM adoption really means think of the end user in mind when creating automation efficiency for reporting, planning, and scenario modeling. Prophix, or any CPM application for that matter, can support very complex and sophisticated business processes. The question we must ponder is how to optimally manage the organization to achieve the goals set out. For example, a retail store operator once tried to build a model that used 15 drivers, leading indicators of sales, to create store level budgets. This failed because the store managers could affect change on only 4 of the drivers. The retail firm changed their planning model to use 5 drivers, 4 that managers could affect and 1 that proved statistically relevant to affect sales. The resulting clarity in focus increased sales 8.4% in the first year of use.

Remember this on your CPM journey.