Financial Planning
& Analysis Software Providers
10 Most Promising Financial Planning & Analysis Software Providers
10 Most Promising Financial Planning & Analysis Software Providers
W
CORpORatE FInanCE tECHnOlOGY SpECIal
The Navigator for Enterprise Solutions
apRIl - 2014
CIOREVIEW.COM
In My Opinion
Thomas W. Sweet
SVP & CFO, Dell Inc
CFO Viewpoints
Fran Shammo
EVP & CFO, Verizon Communications
Bob Swan
SVP, Finance & CFO, eBay
Wade D. Miquelon
CFO & President- International, Walgreens
BOARD International:
Taking Budgeting
and Planning to a New High
Giovanni Grossi
CEO
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CIOReview
march 2014
hile corporate strategy helps determine the long-range vision
for a company, the business environment is constantly
changing, leaving a questionable impact on optimizing
efficiency and effectiveness in a firm’s current operations. To help finance
sectors to cope with agility and performance ratio, many companies are
coming up with financial planning and analysis software solutions, which
provide key financial modeling capabilities to help companies meet their
budgeting and ongoing forecasting needs.
With the assistance of new technologies, the vendors create tools
with which the businesses can easily access comprehensive financial
reports and metrics that give a unique perspective into the operations. The
software provides complete overview into an organization, with budgets
that include costs, deadlines, deliverables, workflows, and summaries.
It is now time for finance to demonstrate how it can support business
strategy, competitive analysis, overall enterprise performance planning
and management, and drive revenue and profit growth.
In the last few months we have looked at hundreds of solution
providers who primarily serve the finance industry, and shortlisted the
ones that are at the forefront of tackling challenges faced by this industry.
In our selection we looked at the vendor’s capability to fulfill the
needs of the finance sector through the supply of a variety of financial
planning and analysis softwares that support core business processes,
including innovation areas related to cloud, mobile, Saas, PaaS and
ERP, Big Data and analytics, mobility, and social media in the specific
context of the finance industry. We present to you CIOReview’s
10 Most Promising Financial Planning and Analysis Software
Providers 2014.
Company:
Description:
deFacto Global,Inc.
deFacto Global is a Microsoftcentric software company offering
deFacto Performance Management,
an enterprise-quality budgeting,
forecasting, consolidation, analysis
and reporting product that is
packaged and priced for companies
of any size.
Key Person:
Bob Bedard
CEO & President
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CIOReview
April 2014
deFacto Global
High-Performance CPM Is Redefining the Role of
Enterprise-Quality FP&A Tools
I
n today’s environment, businesses of every size need to
process and analyze higher volumes of data, more quickly and
accurately in order to make better decisions. High performance,
enterprise-quality Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
is opening the door to providing more comprehensive and realtime analytics across the enterprise. It expands the traditional
forecasting, planning, and analytical (FP&A) capabilities within
finance and extends CPM’s decision support analytics to LOB
operations, thus enabling the more effective synchronization of
business’ operations and better overall performance using a CPM
single product.
From Fortune 1000 firms to middle
market companies, deFacto is the
performance management tool of
choice
deFacto Global (based in Ridgefield, CT) offers deFacto
Performance Management, an enterprise-quality CPM that is
packaged and priced for companies of any size. deFacto is a
Microsoft-centric tool that unifies budgeting,
forecasting, consolidation, analysis and
reporting in a single product. It empowers
companies to drive planning processes with
the ability to perform real-time analysis.
The solution goes far beyond usual slicing
and dicing of data to allow nearly instant
analysis and reporting of financial and
operational data. “Best of all, deFacto is
designed to be administered by business users
who can build and manage their own financial
models, manage user security and more,” says
Bob Bedard, President and CEO, deFacto Global.
By supporting native integration
with industry-standard Business
Intelligence (BI) and dashboard
tools
like
SharePoint,
Tableau and others,
deFacto
seamlessly
Bob Bedard
complements any BI strategy designed to meet the analysis and
reporting needs of any organization. It also comes with pre-built
Extract, Translate, and Load (ETL) connectors to a wide range of
ERP and back-end systems, including Microsoft Dynamics ERP
and CRM, Oracle, SAP, JD Edwards, IBM DB2 and more.
“The best managed organizations work from a single version
of the truth, clearly understand their business reality, and make
accurate and timely decisions based on financial and operational
facts,” says Bedard, upholding company’s namesake—deFacto,
which means from truth, fact or reality.
deFacto differs from its competitors in a number of ways,
including utilizing “intelligent caching” to support very high
processing speeds. Clients have found reduction in processing
times from hours to minutes using deFacto in place of Corporate
Performance Management tools offered by the Big Three.
In addition, deFacto can scale to support a handful of users to
hundreds or more with better performance. deFacto’s client list
includes Fortune 1000 firms to mid-sized organization. And
the company acts as full service partner, supporting its clients
through the entire process of decision making to implementation
to support.
deFacto has enabled companies to achieve significant
improvements, an example being a major U.S. telecom company
whose financial planning and forecasting system was unable to
handle its increasingly large volumes of data, which resulted
in complex issues. After researching potential alternative
solution, the company chose deFacto because of its
unique ability to provide scalability, interoperability,
accuracy, reliability, data management capabilities,
and an Excel interface. The change has been
dramatic—including an overall performance
improvement of 1,000 percent, enabling the
client to perform analyses that were never
before possible.
“We help companies of all sizes operate like
the world’s top performers by measuring and
managing financial and operational performance
accurately, simply, and quickly. Although
the business operations may
differ for each customer, the
way they are achieving
their goals is the same,”
says Bedard.
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CIOReview
April 2014