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Corporate performance management, also called enterprise performance management, describes the practices that help companies plan and manage the financial success of their organization. A CPM system is software that monitors and manages an organization's performance, according to key performance indicators. These can be revenue, return on investment, or other corporate strategic goals, such as increasing operational efficiency or improving corporate strategy.
Corporate performance management systems support financial budgeting, planning and forecasting, and help leaders manage strategy and track the company’s financial health against goals. CPM tools are commonly used by the finance department, but are increasingly designed to be used across the enterprise. All in all, financial corporate performance management helps CFOs and other leaders maintain a clear picture of organizational performance.
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) is closely related to Business Intelligence (BI).
CPM leverages the data provided by BI to guide the organization towards its strategic objectives. The KPIs and scorecards that are the endpoint of BI systems are the starting point of CPM. CPM systems link those metrics to the strategic goals of the organization.
BI is focused on gathering and processing disparate data and presenting it in an easy to digest form like a report or visualization or a dashboard. However, reporting is not necessarily linked to an organization’s strategy. It does not include any mechanisms for planning, controlling, or managing towards business objectives or KPIs.
The fact that these categories are so closely related has led to some category convergence. A number of products offer both CPM and BI capabilities in the same platform.
These activities are designed to assist with both data-driven operational, short-term planning and strategic long-term planning:
Long-term financial planning
Financial budgeting
Forecasting
Scenario modeling
Management reporting
These features allow CPM users to combine and examine data from multiple entities:
Financial data consolidation
Journal entries and reports
Multi-currency management
Intercompany eliminations
Minority ownership
Local and consolidated reporting
Detailed audit trails
These features assist CPM users with their financial statements and regulatory filings:
Financial statement reporting
Management reporting
Excel-based reporting
Automated board and financial reporting
XBRL support for regulatory filing
These tools for at-a-glance and in-depth analysis help CPM users interpret performance metrics in the context of their company's larger strategic goals:
Personalized dashboards
Color-coded scorecards
KPIs
Cost and profitability analysis
Key Performance Indicator setting
Benchmarking with external data
It is vitally important for a CPM system to integrate with a company's BI system. The BI system feeds the CPM system performance data, which the CPM system links with strategic and financial data for the purpose of higher level planning and assessment. Types of integration include:
Flat file integration
Excel data integration
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
This is a process-oriented set of tasks that involves financial activities including:
Budgeting
Planning
Forecasting
Financial consolidation and close
Financial reporting and compliance
Analytics and financial reporting
Calculating return on investment (ROI)
Overhead and operational costs
Profitability modeling
Finance vs Strategy: Do you care more about strategic planning or financials (such as consolidation and close, reporting, etc)? Products rarely do both of these well, so depending on which is your priority, compare tools based on both capabilities. Look at feature ratings for budgeting, planning and forecasting, versus consolidation and close and reporting.
Deployment type: Products may be cloud-based, on-premise, or offer both deployment types.
Usability: Ease of use is an important factor, even more so if your use of the CPM platform will extend beyond the Finance team. Look for comments about usability in pros & cons sections of reviews, and compare how the products rate for usability.
Reporting: CPM is very centered on reporting and the ability to build custom reports. Reviewers often comment on the quality of reporting, and are asked to rate products based on reporting features.
Pricing varies widely depending on whether tools are designed to serve SMBs or enterprises. Subscription pricing structure is usually per seat per month, with lower pricing for read-only seats. Enterprises are typically paying in the region of $25k total subscription price for market leading solutions.
Performance Canvas' pcLegal targets mid-sized to large organizations that want a more unified and Excel-based approach to financial budgeting and planning, modeling, dashboards, profitability analysis, KPI setting, performance reporting, and advanced consolidation. It supports both on premise, host…
The Questica suite of products are part of a comprehensive web-based budgeting preparation, performance, management and data visualization solution that enables public sector and non-profit organizations to improve and shorten their budgeting cycles. Questica Budget is a fully featured, multi-user …
Questica Performance captures key measures and provides dynamic analytic tools to evaluate and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of programs and services. It integrates with Questica Budget, and can be deployed as a web-based tool, on-premise, or cloud. The Questica suite of products are part…
idu-Concept promises to automate and streamline the manual process of spreadsheet-based budgeting, forecasting and reporting. idu-Concept provides budgeting, forecasting and reporting tools with easy-to-use modules. It is available both on premise and as a cloud solution. The main value proposition…
LivaBudget is a ready-to-use CPM System. The vendor promises big know-how for most sectors. Users are able to generate Solo and Consolidated budgets in accordance with COA, IFRS, GAAP etc standards. The goal of these solutions is to allow users to run budgeting process faster, make them more accurat…
Catalyst from EBM Software in Minneapolis is a cloud-based business performance application suite, designed to provide an environment and workflow for understanding business profitability.
According to the vendor, Onestream XF is the first smart corporate performance (CPM) platform that allows organizations to truly unify financial consolidation and reporting, planning, data quality and analytics.The vendor says their unique extensible dimensionality allows their customers to deliver …
Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management (Infor d/EPM) is stated by the vendor to combine modern intelligent business tools and financial performance management capabilities into one EPM software solution, d/EPM is designed to enable the user to consistently report with confidence, measure pa…
Corporater is a CPM suite offering balanced scorecards, KPIs and dashboards, budgeting and planning, and performance reporting. The company is based in Norway and it's customer base is mainly European. The platform is built on the powerful SAP HANA data platform.
DataRails is an augmented intelligence platform designed to enable finance professionals to independently work with data, and a financial analytics platform. It is a turnkey solution, that lets users work with cross-organizational data on their own. Users can uncover actionable insights in four step…
There are plenty of options out there, but here's our shortlist of the best Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Software. These products won a Top Rated award for having excellent customer satisfaction ratings. The list is based purely on reviews; there is no paid placement, and analyst opinions do not influence the rankings. To qualify, a product must have 10 or more recent reviews and a trScore of 7.5 or higher, indicating above-average satisfaction for business technology. The products with the highest trScores appear first on the list. Read more about the Top Rated criteria.
