Recent events have accelerated cycles, with successive crises such as the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders must anticipate to ensure business continuity, regardless of the sector. Financial professionals are now at the heart of management and must use the best technologies and financial performance tools.
Operational Excellence: Performance Management & EPM Tools
Current EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) solutions address the challenges faced by management and financial departments by:
- Securing data
- Optimizing processes
- Improving the communication of analyses and dashboards
- Increasing agility in analyses
- Simulating strategic scenarios
- Developing the Business Partner role
What Needs Does an EPM Address?
The tool helps to plan, budget, simulate, and report performance. The solutions consolidate financial results and perform statutory consolidation of a group’s financial data. Key functions include:
- Data Management: integration and validation of financial and non-financial data, intercompany reconciliation
- Planning: financial planning (P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement), budget development and forecasting, scenario management (simulations, comparisons), sales & operations planning (S&OP)
- Financial Close: statutory and management consolidation, IFRS16 management
- Reporting: statutory and management reports, non-financial reports (ESG, operational KPIs), ad-hoc analyses, BI integration
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Offer Details
Althéa provides its expertise to transform your organization and processes, from the master plan to the achievement of your strategic objectives. Our consultants, trained in finance roles and processes and process transformation, provide support for:
- Supporting all phases of your projects, from upstream to Go-Live
- Creating transformation roadmaps and current-state assessments
- Defining your target processes
- Drafting your specifications
- Assisting in the selection (call for tenders, RFI, RFP) of solutions and integrators
- Providing business support in implementation projects
- Managing change management and project communication
Furthermore, we integrate AI and machine learning into your EPM solution to enhance performance management capabilities.
Our strengths to guarantee the success of your projects
We offer a 360° approach that addresses all project stages, with experienced teams and an understanding of business lines, tools, and project techniques. Our strengths include:
- Experience with clients of all sizes and sectors
- Accelerators for the success of your project, ensuring cost and deadline control
- Mastery of major financial processes
- Benchmarks of leading market solutions
- Methodology: classic or Agile project, adapted to your context
- Proactive risk and issue management
- Independence from software vendors for objective recommendations
EPM for ESG Performance
EPMs meet CSR reporting needs, automating data collection and managing large volumes of data. Since 2023, the CSRD directive imposes new extra-financial reporting requirements. EPMs enable:
- To automate data collection
- To manage large volumes of data
- To meet legal obligations for ESG reporting
- To enrich budgets and analyses with ESG data
Key Figures
Finance & Procurement Consultants
of consultants have more than 5 years of experience
successful Finance & Procurement transformation projects since the practice was launched in 2017
master plan or solution selection support assignments per year
Our References
For a luxury player
38,000 employees, €13.1B in revenue
Modernization of IBM’s payroll budgeting tool
Solution: IBM Planning Analytics
Intervention:
- Launch of an RFI to shortlist candidate tools for replacing the existing solution.
- Justified selection dossier taking into account the pain points of the existing solution to quantify its modernization during the mission.
For a concession operator
16,800 employees, €7B in revenue
Scoping, assistance in choosing a solution for budgeting, reporting harmonization, and replication of consolidation processes for scenario comparison implementation
Solution: CCH Tagetik
Intervention:
- Standardization of reporting formats and harmonization of practices
- Assistance in solution selection
- AMOA, PMO, and Change management for solution implementation and deployment (France and rest of the world)
Pour une association en charge du service civique
16 800 salariés, 7 Mds de CA
Scoping, assistance in choosing a solution for budgeting, reporting harmonization, and replication of consolidation processes for scenario comparison implementation
Solution: CCH Tagetik
Intervention:
- Standardization of reporting formats and harmonization of practices
- Assistance in solution selection
- AMOA, PMO, and Change management for solution implementation and deployment (France and rest of the world).
For an association responsible for civic service
600 employees, €1.2M in revenue
Definition of application roadmap to cover budgeting needs, financing search, and operational processes
Solutions:
- EPM (Workday)
- CRM (Yellow Box)
- HRIS-like (Huggle)
Intervention:
- Definition of the target IS mapping
- Assistance in choosing an EPM, a CRM, and an HRIS-like tool
- AMOA and PMO in the different implementation phases
- Change management for deployment in different regions of France
Challenges
Data Accuracy and Reliability
EPM tools secure and reliably manage data, ensuring accurate and auditable performance analyses, which enables leaders to make informed decisions.
Process Optimization and Operational Efficiency
EPM solutions optimize and secure financial processes, improving operational efficiency by automating planning, scenario management, and financial results consolidation.
Regulatory Compliance and ESG Performance
EPM tools ensure compliance with the CSRD directive by automating data collection and integrating ESG indicators into analyses, thereby improving corporate transparency and sustainability.
Contacts
Enterprise Performance Management: What You Need to Know
What organizational prerequisites are needed to deploy an Enterprise Performance Management solution?
Deploying an Enterprise Performance Management solution requires rigorous organizational preparation. The first step is to establish clear governance, involving the finance department and other key business functions. Alignment between general management and operational teams is essential to define the project’s strategic objectives.
EPM implementation also requires precise mapping of existing business processes, particularly regarding budgetary planning and financial consolidation. This analysis helps identify areas for improvement and define new management processes to be put in place.
Evaluating technical and human resources is another fundamental prerequisite. Integration with existing systems (ERP, Business Intelligence) must be planned, and the necessary skills identified to ensure a successful transition to the new solution.
What best practices help maximize adoption?
The success of an EPM project largely depends on user adoption. A progressive deployment approach, starting with key modules before extending functionalities, facilitates user adoption by teams.
The training plan must be adapted to different user profiles, from financial analysts to operational managers, taking into account their specific needs:
- For daily users: in-depth mastery of planning and budgeting functionalities
- For decision-makers: focus on KPI visualization and predictive analytics
Training sessions combine theory and practice, with real-world use cases drawn from the company’s context. The use of the test environment allows users to familiarize themselves with the interface and functionalities without risk to production data.
Note: Post-training technical support is crucial to maintain the learning dynamic. Establishing a knowledge base, user guides, and dedicated assistance helps support teams’ skill development in the long term.
What are the business processes covered by Enterprise Performance Management?
The business processes covered by Enterprise Performance Management revolve around several fundamental axes.
- The financial planning cycle forms the core of the system, encompassing budgeting, rolling forecasts, and scenario modeling.
- Financial consolidation represents another key process, automating data collection and aggregation across the enterprise. EPM ensures the traceability of adjustments and compliance with accounting standards, while reducing the risk of errors in reporting.
- Management control processes also benefit from EPM with dynamic dashboards and real-time variance analysis. The solution optimizes cost monitoring and profitability by product, department, or geographical area.
How does EPM adapt to new ESG reporting needs?
The growing demands for extra-financial reporting are pushing EPM solutions to adapt. Modern platforms now integrate specific functionalities for collecting and analyzing ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data.
The added value of EPM in this area lies in its ability to:
- Automate the collection of ESG indicators
- Ensure data traceability and auditability
- Produce reports compliant with new regulations
- Integrate ESG criteria into strategic planning
Embedded artificial intelligence makes it possible to identify correlations between financial and extra-financial performance, offering a holistic view of value creation.
What is the typical ROI of an Enterprise Performance Management project?
ROI varies depending on several general factors: company size, organizational complexity, maturity level of existing processes, and the chosen EPM solution (Cloud vs. On-premise). Thus, the return on investment (ROI) of an Enterprise Performance Management project can be analyzed from several angles.
Quantitatively, the ROI of an EPM project is generally measured over a period of 2 to 3 years. Direct financial gains primarily come from:
- 40-60%* reduction in time spent on financial consolidation
- 30-50% decrease in costs related to budgeting processes
- 20-25% optimization of resources dedicated to reporting
- 15-20% improvement in forecast accuracy
The impact on operational performance translates into measurable benefits:
- Acceleration of closing cycles (reduction of 5 to 10 days on average)
- 70-80% automation of manual reporting processes
- 50-60% reduction in errors in financial data
*Please note, all these averages are by nature estimates and differ depending on the various business sectors and organizational specificities encountered.
