Charlie LiuGlobal Chief Customer Happiness Officer | CEO Founder, FCFO & CFO Tech Advisory, MCC Inc. · Founder CEO & CFO Advisory at MCC Inc - FP&A Experts & Top Tier Vena Partner | Driving Financial Excellence | Chief Happiness Officer

How did the market for planning and forecasting systems change

20 Mar 2024 · 1 min

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1:03

In this brief talk, a speaker with roughly a decade of experience in enterprise performance management (EPM) describes how the market has transformed over the past ten years. Early EPM offerings were built around professional‑services‑heavy models, where vendors provided custom platforms and consulting to deliver value. Today, advances in technology and the proliferation of data have enabled finance leaders to access a richer set of tools. Modern EPM solutions now embed analytics, reporting, integration, and automation directly in the software, allowing organizations to generate insights and streamline processes without extensive consulting. This shift means that value is realized much more quickly, as software can automate and accelerate tasks that previously required manual design by consultants.

Chapters

So I've been in the EPM space for around 10 years now, and I find that in the last 10 years things have changed drastically. A lot of the vendors, almost the first version of what it was 10 years ago, they were very professional service driven. It's almost like they created a platform to enable a professional services framework in terms of how they provide value for their clients. What I've noticed now is because the available technologies better and more available for finance leaders, right? There's more tools, more data. Instead of heavily relying on professional services to design the solutions, give recommendations, there's a lot of insights and analysis that you can build off the data. What that also means is a lot of the analysis, reporting, integration, a lot of the work that would be previously designed and provided by a consultant is definitely something that we can provide from a software offers perspective now where we can automate, streamline a lot of those processes. So you're going to get value much faster.