When comparing different performance management systems, you should look for software that offers these key capabilities, whether as core capabilities or as potential add-ons that can change with the needs of your evolving organization:

Planning, Analysis, and Forecasting

If you can automate budgeting and perform driver-based forecasting, “what-if” scenario modeling and multidimensional profitability analysis, then you can radically transform your entire planning cycle. With a system that enables you to rapidly analyze data, model business requirements, and conveniently collaborate on plans, budgets, and forecasts, you’ll uncover hidden business options and optimize performance faster and easier.

Profitability Modeling and Optimization

The right performance management system should help you accelerate profitability analysis with an organization-wide approach that joins financial, operational, and strategic planning.  With the right business analytics capabilities, you can hone your profitability modeling and optimization with powerful capabilities like analytical reporting, trend analysis, what-if analysis, and more.

Financial Close Management

Automating your close, consolidation, and reporting process, from data collection to output of management and regulatory reports, will revolutionize your entire financial management operation. You will no longer rely on error-prone, manual steps. Instead, your finance team will streamline the close process to deliver complete financial results, create financial and management reports, and provide the chief financial officer (CFO) with an enterprise view of key financial ratios and metrics.

Performance Reporting and Scorecarding

Data visualizations in the form of dashboards and scorecards help you align strategy with execution, communicate goals, and monitor your performance against targets. With one glance at a graphical interface you’ll be able to monitor and manage business metrics, comparing them with the strategic and operational objectives of your organization to make sure you stay on track.

Disclosure Management

The best performance management systems help to streamline your disclosure process – and once you’ve experienced the ease and peace of mind that comes with it, you won’t ever want to go back to your old way of doing things. Standardize and automate manual processes to reduce risk.  Leverage your systems to ensure accurate, consistent data for regulatory disclosures and statutory reports, including XBRL.

Sales Performance Management

One of the KPIs you’ll want to manage is sales performance, and good sales performance management delivers measurable improvements for your organization’s finance, sales, human resources, and IT departments.  Align sales performance with sales strategy through more effective and efficient territory management, quota management, channel management and incentive compensation management.

Automation and Integration

Process automation and data integration are key components that we praise the most in today’s performance management systems.  With these capabilities, you’ll reduce custom coding and manual processes across platforms and applications.  You’ll also introduce self-service automation for business users and unlock proprietary cube data, which makes things run even smoother.

While each of the core capabilities described above are impressive on their own, when combined into a performance management system you can make better decisions faster, understand the link between operational and strategic performance drivers, and improve organizational visibility.

That makes sense, right? If you think that performance management systems might make sense for your organization, just contact us or click on the button below.

The post What to Look For in a Performance Management System appeared first on nexDimension.

But you may ask yourself, why does my organization need to be more analytics driven, and why do I need performance management to make it so? There are many reasons why organizations are increasingly driven to take action toward establishing and improving performance management practices, but three problems stand out:

The Need for Faster, More Accurate Decision-Making

Our fast-paced world is getting faster. We need to collect information, analyze possibilities, and respond to actions as quickly as possible. Organizations suffer when they are shackled by slow action and reaction times, but the problems caused by this slowness are compounded if the decisions being made are based on incorrect information.  Data management requires increased speed and accuracy, and performance management systems support this.

The Need to Understand Performance Drivers

Unlike strategic performance drivers, which are trend-based KPIs that change slowly over time, operational performance drivers are characterized by their immediacy. These performance metrics, such as product order turn-around times or sales win rates, can contribute to and be indicative of strategic performance metrics like overall customer satisfaction. Performance management systems improve the understanding of these performance drivers and enable you to act upon that understanding. Basically, they help you identify and manage the root causes and effects that occur throughout your organization

The Need for Better Executive Visibility to Enable Decision-Making

Partly because of the first problem we identified — slow and inaccurate decision-making tools and processes — many organizations experience insufficient visibility among executives. Performance-related analysis and informed decisions fall by the wayside if executives can’t quickly, easily, and accurately understand how activities are impacting goals. A well-integrated performance management system eliminates this opacity.

Now that we understand why performance management systems play such a critical role in the success of today’s organizations, our next step is to identify what to look for when selecting the right performance management system for your organization.  We’ll cover that in a future post, so stay tuned.

The post Why Does Your Organization Need Performance Management? appeared first on nexDimension.

We hear these words bandied about frequently, and you can’t peruse a business technology journal without encountering multiple advertisements touting performance management tools with apparently universal applications and benefits:  “You need performance management, your organization needs performance management, and EVERYONE needs performance management,” they admonish.

Driven bleary-eyed by case studies and whitepapers proclaiming that performance management is your organization’s last and only hope, you feverishly agree, and pronounce that you and your organization do indeed need performance management!  But before you can sign on the dotted line and acquire these amazing tools, a thought smacks against the inside of your noggin like a well-timed brick, and you shake yourself from your stupor.

“Wait a minute,” you mutter, shooing away the performance peddlers, “What the heck IS performance management, really? And how will its implementation and use REALLY affect my organization and me?”

Ah, I’m glad you asked, because we’re here to answer.

Performance: the execution or accomplishment of work, acts, feats, etc.; a particular action, deed, or proceeding.

Management: the act or manner of managing; handling, direction, or control; skill in managing; executive ability.

Let’s combine these definitions and define performance management like this:

Performance Management: The act or manner of managing, handling, directing, and controlling the execution or accomplishment of work, acts, or feats; skill in managing a particular action, deed, or proceeding.

That still sounds kind of vague, doesn’t it? It sounds like performance management is just, well, managing the performance of a particular entity to ensure that goals are met effectively and efficiently.  And isn’t that what general business management has always strived toward? What is it about today’s environment that makes so many people talk about corporate performance management and enterprise performance management as if it is a new thing?  And what does it mean to YOU?

While the ideas behind performance management have been around for a while, the technologies enabling it to become a sophisticated discipline are relatively new.  In the 1970s, the father of performance management, Dr. Aubrey Daniels, coined the phrase “performance management” to describe the application of human behavior analysis to optimize organizational performance. As years passed, the practice of performance management has grown to encompass more than managing human assets. It now extends to managing all major assets such as money and technology to set, measure, and meet goals.

Essentially, performance management is a discipline that allows an organization to align various activities with its objectives. This requires gathering, tracking, analyzing and acting upon information and data that can change multiple times throughout the day or week. This is a practice that large organizations have been exercising for some time, and smaller organizations are increasingly adopting. In recent years, technological developments have made effective performance management systems attainable for more organizations, from vast enterprises to smaller emerging enterprises, and from commercial to public sector entities.

So now that we understand the history and purpose of performance management in today’s business environment, we can now summarize performance management systems like this:

In future blog posts, we’ll explain more about how performance management systems can help you solve big problems, what to look for when selecting the right system for you, and what strategies you need to implement throughout your process. So stay tuned.

The post Defining Performance Management: What is Performance Management, Really? appeared first on nexDimension.

If you use a manual process to produce your Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), then you aren’t absorbed in just the trees. You’re peering with your nose pressed against tree bark as you hurriedly comb through the minutiae of report building, editing, reviewing, approving, and publishing.  You might not know if you’re even in a forest anymore – and that’s not good for your organization.

Fortunately, we know how to help you see the forest again and improve organizational insight by automating your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management.  We’ve written about how this revolutionary, easy-to-use tool helps you save resources, reduce risk, cut costs, and even reduce cycle times. But it can also help you regain focus on all the details, both small and large, granting visibility into your CAFR process and enabling you to step back and look at your entire report as a whole.

Most challenges to organizational insight stemming from manual CAFR production processes are due to:

• Limited time
• Errors in the data that create a lack of confidence in the report
• Inability to incorporate last-minute changes into the report

All of these challenges are time-related, and if you’ve already read our explanation of how IBM Cognos Disclosure Management reduces your cycle times, then you might already know where we’re headed here. But if yours is like most organizations, you barely have enough time to finish your CAFR report to minimal satisfaction, let alone conduct the process with an optimal amount of communication, transparency, and visibility. So you’re often left with an opaque, difficult-to-manage process that provides results with dubious accuracy. But that’s not how things have to be.

Switch from your manual CAFR process to one automated by IBM Cognos Disclosure Management and you’ll improve organizational insight because:

• Collaboration, drag-and-drop workflow, report status, data integration, reusable templates, compliance checklists, a system-maintained audit trail, and lots of other features simplify and shorten the entire reporting process. That leaves you with more time and resources leftover to conduct detailed, accurate analysis of your situation.
• So many automated features, from variables in text to the system-maintained audit trail, virtually eliminate all the errors that riddle manual CAFR processes. This means that your data and the results of your analysis can be trusted.
• Real-time data enables you to automatically incorporate last-minute changes into your report. This adds even more credibility to your final CAFR because you won’t have missed a thing.

If you want to improve your organizational insight, regain visibility, and automate your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, start now by contacting us (link). You can also click the button below and schedule a consultation today.

The post Improve Organizational Insight: Get the Whole Picture of Your CAFR Process appeared first on nexDimension.

If your CAFR process is a manual one, then you’re familiar with a complicated procedure requiring a daunting time commitment. Many organizations spend several months out of the year on their CAFR – but if you automate your process, you will reduce cycle times.

Some key drivers of long cycle times include:

• The inefficient repetition of many manual steps
• The need to check, re-check, and correct all errors by hand
• The creation and formatting of several output types
• The involvement of many people, sometimes all working simultaneously, throughout many steps in the process

You can probably envision it now: all the members of your team trying to handle different portions of the CAFR, with all the problems that come from having too many cooks in the kitchen. You accidentally duplicate some efforts and omit others.  Sometimes you can’t do your part until someone else finishes theirs. You each spend weeks pouring over the same large chunk of the report, searching for errors and correcting them. You hold status meetings to determine what has to be done next and who has to do it. And time drags on and on, your deadline approaches, and you still have so much you want to do. Sound familiar?

When you automate your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, you eliminate those bottlenecks, redundancies and miscommunications right along with the manual process that caused them  — and that saves time. IBM Cognos Disclosure Management reduces cycle times because:

• With IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, you can use the report from a prior year as a template for your next report. The latest data loads automatically into a report template that is pre-formatted, so you won’t waste valuable time recreating it.
• Variables in text will flow data everywhere there is a reference, and because your documents are reusable, you can also reuse the same variables in subsequent years. This means that the narrative portion of your report will automatically pull the data you need, shaving even more time off your workload.
• IBM Cognos Disclosure Management makes it easy to work on the CAFR as a team. Drag-and-drop workflow features allow you to track the status of each section of the document.  Since you can view and manage due dates and responsibility assignments, you won’t have any confusion about what has to be done and who has to do it.
• A system-maintained audit trail tracks every change to the document.  Now you can easily compare any two versions of the document to see what changed, who changed it, and when it changed, so you won’t have to spend as many hours in a meeting trying to figure it out.

If you’re struggling with long cycle times in your CAFR production, IBM Cognos Disclosure Management might be the solution you’ve been waiting for. Want to learn more?  Just call us or click on the button below to request a personal consultation.

The post Reduce Cycle Times: How to Actually Meet Your CAFR Deadline (For Real!) appeared first on nexDimension.

When you produce your CAFR manually, internal (and possibly external) audit costs increase because manual processes are prone to the following issues:

• Limited internal controls
• Poor audit trails
• Difficulty integrating auditors into a standard workflow

All these factors combine to create a slower, longer, and more difficult auditing process, which in turn drives up costs.  But how can you avoid these issues, which are inherent in a manual CAFR process?

You simply change your process. When you automate your process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, you benefit from these integrated features:

• Internal controls and checklists help you ensure that the proper steps are followed in the creation, submission, and approval of each section in the document.
• A system-maintained audit trail tracks every change to the document.  Now you can easily compare any two versions of the document to see what changed, who changed it, and when it changed.
• A drag-and-drop workflow manager enables you to track the status of each section of the document, with due dates and responsibility assignments for all participants, including internal and external auditors.

Are you ready to make the switch and cut costs with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management?  Then contact us today or click on the button below to schedule your free consultation.

The post Cut Costs: Reduce CAFR Audit Expenses with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management appeared first on nexDimension.

Since most Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) are produced via a slow, error-prone, manual process, their production comprises a huge drain on personnel resources.

For every recurring report you produce manually, at least one member of your team has to manage all these processes by hand:

• Collecting data
• Re-keying data
• Checking and correcting errors
• Consolidating data and spreadsheets
• Formatting reports
• Managing compliance checklists
• Distributing documents for review and approval
• Delivering multiple output types, including Word, Excel, PPT, and PDF

Managing all these tasks with precision requires a huge amount of time and attention, and it usually involves as many team members as a department can spare.

And there’s your problem:  most public sector finance departments already have more tasks at hand than they have hands on deck. Can you afford to spare several or all of your team members to devote ALL their efforts to just one report?

If you’re using a manual process to produce your CAFR, you don’t have a choice: the CAFR must go on, whether or not you have enough resources to comfortably manage it along with all your other responsibilities.  But what if you had a new CAFR process that didn’t drain all your time and people? What if you could automate these manual processes?

Now you can. With IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, you can automate your CAFR production process and do more with less. IBM Cognos Disclosure Management frees up your resources because:

• Data integration enables you to pull your data from a variety of data sources, including ERP systems, financial consolidation applications, relational databases, OLAP databases, and Microsoft Excel. No longer will you be manually keying and re-keying or checking and re-checking data from multiple sources.

• Your source data links to your report data.  That means that every number in the final report links back to a single data source, ensuring that there are no conflicting numbers anywhere in the report. Changes made to the source data will automatically cascade through the report, so you won’t have to make meticulous manual updates every time you update your source system.

• Collaboration and workflow features allow you to track the status of each section of the document.  You can also view and manage due dates and responsibility assignments, so you won’t have any confusion about what has to be done and who has to do it.

• Variables in text will flow data everywhere there is a reference, and you can use those same variables in subsequent years. This means that the narrative portion of your report, produced in Microsoft Word, will automatically pull the data you need without manual interference.

• You can use the report from a prior year as a template for your next report. The latest data is automatically loaded into a report template that is pre-formatted, which saves time and lets you focus on editing the document rather than collecting, consolidating, and formatting data.

• Integrated compliance checklists clearly display rules and validations, making internal and external compliance easier to accomplish and confirm.

• With multiple output options for the report, you can distribute your report as an Excel spreadsheet, Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Word document, and Adobe PDF at the click of a button.  Now you won’t be scrambling at the last minute to format your CAFR for many output types.

• Best of all, IBM Cognos Disclosure Management is so easy to use that you’ll free up personnel to complete other tasks in no time.

If you’re ready to preserve your most valuable resource — your people — with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, call us or click the button below to schedule a free consultation.

The post Save Resources: Stop Wasting Your Most Valuable Assets on Your CAFR appeared first on nexDimension.

• Reducing risk
• Saving resources
• Cutting costs
• Decreasing cycle times
• Improving organizational insight

Now we’re going to explain how Cognos Disclosure Management reduces your risks.

Most CAFR producers are stuck using outdated, manual systems to produce their reports.  As a simple example, let’s imagine that part of your team is working on an Excel spreadsheet.

One person, Bill, starts it, then another person, Sally, edits it and saves an extra copy on her machine. Now we already have a problem: there are two different versions of a spreadsheet that could be mistakenly passed around.

So Sally makes her edits and emails a copy back to Bill for him to look at.  Bill downloads it and mistakenly saves a copy to a shared folder, accidentally enabling employees without proper clearance to view it.

Additionally, now Sally and Bill have both been working on two separate versions, and somehow they wound up with some minor discrepancies between the two that must now be fixed.  They spend hours checking and re-checking their facts and figures, feeling more and more pressure as their deadline approaches.

Do you see what I’m getting at?  There is LOTS of room for error in this process. Here are just a few of the risks Sally and Bill have potentially created:

• Unintended submission of incorrect information
• Premature disclosure of information
• Failure to comply with internal controls for sensitive information
• Late submission

With IBM Cognos Disclosure Management, you will automate previously manual processes. Situations like Bill and Sally’s just won’t happen. Instead, you will dramatically reduce risk in your CAFR process because:

• Your reports data will be linked directly to your source data
• You will have automated internal controls and checklists
• The system maintained audit trail will be clear and correct
• You can use your prior year’s report as a template for your next report

If that sounds good, just wait until a future post in which we explain how IBM Cognos Disclosure Management can increase the capacity of your existing resources.

Want to learn more now?  Contact us today to find out how Cognos Disclosure Management can reduce risk for your CAFR process.

The post Reduce Risk: Stop Preparing Your CAFR by Passing Around Emails appeared first on nexDimension.

On one hand, you have Word and Excel’s obvious good points. Most of today’s workforce is at least passingly familiar with using them, and your department is probably staffed with at least one Excel and Word whiz kid who knows how to use them to their fullest. Their documents are also easy to save and share with others, and they have powerful formatting features.  All in all, they are incredibly robust tools.

On the other hand, you have to concede that for certain tasks, Word and Excel fall short. While you can easily share their documents, actually collaborating on them with your colleagues is difficult, and because they lack proper audit trails and version controls, they are prone to miscommunication. And as well as creating an awkward workflow in general, there are so many ways that this manual process can create mistakes. When you need to build complex, important documents like the CAFR, you really don’t have time for the problems these limitations can cause.

So you’re stuck using software that offers a lot of utility on the one hand, but still causes critical problems on the other.

We now believe it is possible to get the best of both worlds and drop the bad.

We propose to revolutionize your CAFR process with IBM Cognos Disclosure Management. This evolutionary software tool automates the entire reporting process from end to end, which helps to:

• Reduce risk
• Save resources
• Cut costs
• Decrease cycle times
• Improve organizational insight

Want to learn more? This is the first in a series of posts that explain how IBM Cognos Disclosure Management makes all the improvements listed above. Watch this space to learn more – or if you have questions for us now, just click the button below to contact us.

The post The Good, The Bad, and the Revolutionary of Word, Excel, and your CAFR appeared first on nexDimension.

• A fleet of vehicles?
• A manufacturing  facility?
• Production machinery?
• Heavy equipment machinery?

How much time and money do you spend solving problems with these assets?  How would your organization change if you could anticipate your maintenance and quality needs, and stop problems before they start?

With IBM’s new Predictive Maintenance and Quality solution, you be able to monitor how things are going, predict what will happen next, and deliver the precise actions you need to take to resolve issues before they escalate into costly downtime or poor product quality.

Are you as excited about this as we are? Then read on:

This new solution helps you monitor, maintain, and optimize assets for better utilization and performance. That means reductions in your operational costs, improvement in your asset productivity, and increases in your process efficiency.

Predictive Maintenance and Quality will also predict potential asset failure, thus enhancing your product quality and supply chain processes.

The software includes data source connectors and easy-to-read, real-time, interactive models, dashboards, and reports.  So everyone in your organization, from business and maintenance managers to IT specialists, can understand what’s going on.

The easy-to-install, pre-configured software and templates combine data integration with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. With all that information at your fingertips, you’ll be able to make optimized, quick, and accurate operational, maintenance, quality, repair, or component decisions.

And here are some bonuses that IT managers will love: Predictive Maintenance and Quality leverages either structured or unstructured data, either at-rest or streaming, through the entire analytical process. This means that from data integration to orchestration, and from analysis and visualization to decision-making, you will be able to ensure optimal benefits for your organization.

In summary, IBM says that the software’s key features include:

• Real-time capabilities
• Big data, predictive, and advanced analytics
• Quick and accurate decisioning
• Maximo integration
• Open architecture
• Business intelligence
• Accelerated time-to-value

This solution serves various asset-intensive industries and organizations.  So if you like what you’ve heard so far and think Predictive Maintenance and Quality may serve you and your organization well, contact us and we’ll help you explore your options.

The post Stop Problems BEFORE They Start with New Predictive Maintenance and Quality Solution From IBM appeared first on nexDimension.