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 |1 | 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 | 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. | CIOReview April 2014
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