01.21.08

CFO Survey Shows Budgeting Headaches and Trends

Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 11:20 am by irusgroup

A study published in December 2007 by Centage and the Institute of Management & Administration (IOMA) said that despite frustrations with spreadsheets, they remain the most common tool for budgeting and forecasting, used by 85 percent of Small to Mid-Sized Businesses (SMB) and 76 percent of Small to Mid-Sized Enterprises (SME), frequently in combination with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

We can relate to this. Irus has been implementing budgeting and planning solutions for the past decade for companies and government agencies that were stuck in “Excel Hell.”

Budgeting trends identified by the survey include:

  • Most finance executives are not totally confident in the accuracy of their budgets.  
  • The overall trend is to link compensation and goal achievement, seen at 47 percent of SMBs and 65 percent of SMEs. The trend is most prevalent at larger companies (82 percent at those with revenue of $500 million and above).
  • The larger the company, the more compensation is put in this at-risk category: under 10 percent to 20 percent for SMBs, 10-20 percent for SMEs, and 20 percent or more for larger companies.
  • Executives at more than 40 percent of the SMBs/SMEs view their budgets as extremely or very important cash flow management tools, and about 40 percent rate them as somewhat important.
  • The most common Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are Net Income/Loss, Gross Profit, Operating Expenses as a Percentage of Sales, and EBIT.

The second most common “pain point” cited was working with spreadsheets or other technology-related issues. Four out of five of these replies expressed frustration specifically with budgeting in Excel spreadsheets, including: the manual and time-consuming process, frequency of errors, difficulties generating reports and rolling up numbers, and the inability to drill down into the numbers or create what-if scenarios.

01.04.08

Irus Helps PBS Go with Oracle EPB

Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Oracle OBIEE at 3:03 pm by irusgroup

The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had been using Microsoft Excel as its primary budgeting and planning tool. As the organization grew, the limitations of using Excel as an enterprise level budgeting and planning tool became painfully obvious, for all of the usual reasons and then some.

The Irus Group helped PBS understand the benefits and opportunities presented by moving to Oracle EPB (Enterprise Planning and Budgeting). When Oracle introduced EPB, Irus Group was one of only a dozen firms on the planet that were trained to design, develop, implement, and manage EPB. This support was critical to PBS as it was moving to an enterprise system for the first time. The enterprise nature of EPB would open up many financial management opportunities for PBS such as better reporting, easier consolidations, and more effective process management. Since this was such a high-risk endeavor for PBS and since only a handful of consulting firms were even familiar with EPB, PBS needed the Irus Group’s expertise in budgeting and planning and business intelligence to ensure that such a high-risk development effort went flawlessly.

Check out more in this case study.