ERP systems such as Oracle, SAP, and JD Edwards have a huge depth of financial management functions and processing capabilities, but they can also create challenges for finance professionals looking to generate responsive budget forecasts and reports.
For this reason, a growing number of businesses are using an FP&A (financial planning and analysis) platform, such as Corporate Planner, in tandem with their ERP to streamline their planning workflows and reduce the dependence of their finance teams on external developers and IT support personnel.
Let’s look at the main challenges of budgeting and reporting with an ERP system, and how Corporate Planner resolves these issues:
The Oracle, SAP, and JD Edwards platforms are chosen for their sophisticated features and their ability to manage large organisational requirements with diverse multitier financial needs. There is no denying that the platforms are excellent at what they do. However, this same complexity can lead to cumbersome budgeting reporting processes, which can hinder the responsiveness of financial planning. Users sometimes find themselves having to navigate layer upon layer of modules, making even straightforward tasks a time intensive challenge. The datasets involved in these systems can also create a bottleneck for assembling concise and actionable forecasts and reports in a short timeframe.
Solution: Corporate Planner is designed to work in step with your ERP system, quickly extracting and integrating the data you need into a variety of custom-designed forecasts and budgeting reports to support your operational requirements. Corporate Planner can pull data directly from JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, and other financial platforms, reducing the need for manual data transfers and giving you the benefit of near real-time information in an understandable format. This interconnectivity preserves the integrity of your data and avoids duplication, while delivering greater consistency in your planning and strategic decision-making processes.
Enterprise-level ERP systems such as Oracle have a comprehensive range of functions but are often difficult to customise to individual applications. For businesses using their ERP to manage their budgeting and reporting processes, this rigidity can be a frustrating constraint. Often, expert IT support is required, for instance, to produce a tailored report or midyear forecast, and you might even require a specialist developer to implement the necessary adjustments. This can reduce your organisational agility when responding to rapidly changing situations and opportunities.
Solution: one of the benefits of Corporate Planner is the platform’s ability to help you adapt to changing business conditions, without dependence on IT specialists. With its intuitive interface and easy to learn controls, Corporate Planner gives your finance teams greater control over their budgeting and reporting processes, making it easier to consolidate data from multiple locations and departments for a quicker response to market shifts and internal changes.
Producing advanced analyses or management reports using Oracle or SAP can be time consuming. You’ll often need to configure parameters manually to structure data for export, which can take hours over a task that should, ideally, be automated. This cumbersome reporting process can hinder timely decision making as well as eating into productivity.
Solution: Corporate Planner gives you the versatility and agility to generate bespoke reports to meet your specific requirements. With an easy to learn and intuitive interface, users can create drag-and-drop management reports in a fraction of the time required by a larger ERP system. This gives you the benefits of a large-scale ERP system with greater accessibility and reporting agility delivered by Corporate Planner.
While a large ERP system can be expensive and time-consuming to implement and maintain, adding Corporate Planner as a supporting solution can give you a more cost-effective process for managing your reporting and budgeting needs. By streamlining your financial planning processes, Corporate Planner can increase the value of your ERP while improving your overall efficiency and responsiveness.
Corporate Planner is the perfect complement to Oracle or SAP, enhancing the reporting capabilities of each system while improving your organisation’s integration capabilities and reducing your IT support needs. If you would like to find out more, please contact one of the team at Account-Ability today for more information, or to arrange a free demonstration.