How We Help

Column5 helps organizations solve and avoid business problems. Our maturity model helps you define what they are now, while anticipating what they could be. By recognizing issues associated with latter stages early, we help organizations avoid the cost and frustration of incremental implementation approaches.

Stage 1 – Automation

• Excel-based processes are long and error-prone
• Basic information is not easy to access from transaction systems
• The budget process is too detailed, providing little or no value
• Performance measures are spread across the organization on spreadsheets
• Assumptions are not used consistently across the budgeting process

Stage 2 – Consolidation

• Inconsistent business rules and calculations across the organization
• Multiple hierarchy and structural definitions used across the organization
• Data fragmented across multiple data marts is not easily combined
• Basic transaction data is not easily consolidated across multiple systems and business units
• Information structure slow to respond to key changes, such as reorganizations and acquisitions
• More time spent on data acquisition, manipulation, consolidation, and reconciliation, rather than analysis

Stage 3 – Coordination

• Product and customer costs and profitability not understood
• Difficulty establishing agreement about project priorities & linking to strategy
• Special projects required to assess project value & results not always agreed to
• Inconsistent project management & reporting undermines evaluation & execution
• Strategy not clearly defined, communicated and managed
• Too many measures that are not clearly linked to strategy
• Measures are not predictive of future performance

Stage 4 – Integration

• Performance issues with EPM systems
• Greater focus on strategy, but execution problems remain
• Budgeting process is still long and the budget is often out of date before it is finalized
• As budgets become outdated, the link with strategy and balanced scorecard targets become unclear
• Little forward visibility into potential performance and capacity issues
• Overly aggressive targets are not easily identified
• Special studies required to support decisions affecting multiple functions and business units
• Global measures of customer and vendor economics and performance are not readily available

Stage 5 – Transformation

• The CEO is the only one that is not making their numbers
• Operational and capital budgeting remains a highly political process
• Business priorities are unclear, despite using a Balanced Scorecard and a Program Management Office
• Achieving business outcomes that affect multiple functions & business units is difficult
• Employee empowerment programs result in people thinking and acting like business owners
• Unable to quickly respond to changing market conditions when multiple business units are involved