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SAP Analytics
Thought Leadership

Analytics, EPM, and Managed Service

Posted by
Jonathon Pause
Jonathon Pause
on Tue, Jun 23, 2015 @ 10:06 AM

analyticsAnalytics?  Analytics.  Analytics!  Let us simply get it out there – analytics are the newest, hottest technology that everyone is talking about.  “The CFO’s Technology Imperatives for 2015” by Financial Executives International (FEI) and Gartner states, “many IT organizations have made initial investments, but these tend to be tactically focused and do not address the more fundamental issues of data quality and consistency.”  The market is in such a fervor over the promise of analytics that we often lose sight of our greater IT goals, and we do not effectively outline a strategy that can move us toward the new promised land.  

Surveys from Gartner reaffirm these assertions in a study on Top Big Data Challenges.  The top three challenges include how to derive value, how to define strategy, and how to obtain the skills and capabilities needed related to a big data initiative.

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Now that you know you aren’t alone, where do we start?  Column5 believes that successful EPM foundations are crucial for an organization’s success.  By achieving the fifth stage of maturity, or what we call column 5 of EPM maturity, our clients obtain a model which integrates financial, strategic, and operational planning across an entire enterprise with a standardized set of core processes and common data models.  We have seen that clients are more successful when including every decision maker in the planning process and by expanding finance’s ability to partner with other business units.  We have shown that getting the right model and the right audience partnered with maximum automation enables an organization to have agile and fast rolling forecasts with self-service analytics, scenario planning, and 5 day close cycles.

But this isn’t a technology only party. The right model, audience, time approach outlined above marries both new technology improvements with organizational change. Column5 PMO is situated to help you address the vast organizational changes your company needs with Organizational Change Management (OCM)

So if you achieve this, what is next on your path to powerful analytics?  Gartner recommends that companies address their need for greater business intelligence by “ensuring that the most experienced finance people are deployed to work with IT to build and implement a comprehensive BI, analytics and performance management strategy.”  Column5 emphatically agrees with this, but it tends to put your staff in a pinch with supporting the EPM and BI deployments already completed.  The EPM Safety Net & EPM partner programs of our newly announced Column5 Managed Service practice are designed to be your backbone when your highly skilled resources need to be reallocated.  Let our team of experienced BPC administrators and developers carry the extra burden of owning your system while you focus on the pursuit of analytics.

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