What's the problem? Why did it happen? and What will be done to prevent it? EPM root Analysis

EPM software not only are the best product to build your budget or your consolidated Financial statement but, more often, are the best instruments in our hands to understand why things happens.

Each big company has a detailed chart of account and each account hide many informations; not always our customer are able to understand Why things happens.
Even if is not properly the case, root analysis can be the best solution in that cases.

Root cause analysis is an approach for identifying the underlying causes of why an incident occurred so that the most effective solutions can be identified and implemented.  It's typically used when something goes badly, but can also be used when something goes well.
The newest and well known EPM softwares are nowadays able to apply a root analysis and CFO and stakeholders can sleep peacefully; by analyzing deeply our database, asking to aour collegue, answering to same question can help to understand our business, especially in the last years.

Information is all we need to understand the business and the business's problems and more informations we have, more problems we can solve. And once the problem is found, we can start thinking how to prevent it!  
To much expenses? Few revenues? Some products are badly sold?
Starting analyzing unaggregated level of data and asking what and why people "create" business data is the aim of all successfull companies.


 

The three best skills each EPM consultant should have

Somethimes when people starts a new EPM project happens something really strange; people involved in the project doesn't have the right skills and ability required. The reasons can be different but at the end the reality is that some project take the wrong way and bring the projects to failure.

So, which are the three main skills to perform at the top? I think each of us should be:

1. Customer oriented: this mean that we should immediatly understand  the deep reasons that drives our customer to start a new project. Probably that reason concern a personal growth inside the company or simply a gain of time and capacity to give fast and responsive information.
2. Able to be indipendent: of course the best value provided can be offered better if we are able to start and carry forward the whole project: starting with the functional analysis and developing the technicalities the customer need to reach his goal.
3. Passionate and critic: this is the aim of all EPM project. Our passion should be transmitted to our team (both internal and external) in order to make things easier. Passion and criticism are the best way to improve ourselves and communicate our audience who we are, where we are going and why we are there!

How many of this skylls do you have?

The importance of the right training on EPM solutions

Many customers doesn't care about good training session. Many of them thing that the most important things will be always done by consultats (reports, data entry sheets, dimension, user concept). If this sentence is true, is also true that many company can considerarly reduce project costs by training themselfs in the better way.

Of course this can only be possible with the right training session and the right peoples.
Usually, in fact, many customers overestimate the ability to train other people and let things go.
At the end, the perfect project can only be concluded with a really usefull training session; i usually spend 5-10 days at all with my customer in order to be sure they have the control of the EPM solution.

The advantages for our clients are:
-cost reduction
-reporting speed
-self motivation
-better use of the solution

In fact i had always a good feedback from my clients also after years; this mean not only lose of some money (for me), but especially customer retention and somethimes new and big projects!

So, if you think that training is not so usefull, you are wrong!