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High Performace: Finanical Management

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Office of Finance Overview

"Simpson Associates helped us to remove our dependence on spreadsheets, improve budgetary control throughout the organisation, make more efficient the production of accurate financial information and free resources in Finance to strengthen strategic support to the business." Management Accountant

Plan - Overview

Simpson Associates delivers award winning Performance Management solutions and expertise spanning a wide spectrum of business processes and sectors. Performance Management provides companies with the ability to connect vision, strategy and performance within a secure, closed loop solution. Managing the collection, consolidation, analysis and reporting of business information, poses a formidable challenge for all companies. Simpson Associates responds to that challenge by making a powerful difference to an organisation's ability to plan, monitor and understand it's financial performance

Cognos - the current world leader in Performance Management software for organisations large and small. Cognos solutions let companies improve and direct Performance Management by enabling all of the key steps in the management cycle - from planning, budgetting, forecasting and financial consolidation, to the measurement and monitoring of performance, to reporting and analyses. Cognos is the only company to currently support all of these key management activities with a complete, integrated solution spanning all of the essential components of performance management; enterprise planning, scorecarding and Business Intelligence.

Performance Management - Why Now?

Regulatory Factors

  • Sarbanes-Oxley Act and increasingly the compliance factors from financial legislation mean organisations must report immediately to shareholders issues that affect performance.
  • Such immediacy is not possible without well-organised, structured processes and well-implemented information systems such as performance management to address these needs.

Speed of Change

  • Traditional budgetting and forecasting processes need frequent review and maintenance of linkages. As such, they are slow, expensive and disconnected from what is driving the business.
  • Spreadsheets are adequate for personal productivity, but not as part of critical business processes requiring collaborative workflows.
  • Ponderous annual budgetting processes have completely lost relevance. Highly responsive planning and control cycles now form the needs of modern organisations, with iterative needs for budgeting and planning processes.

Process Limitations

  • Budgets are often focused on outcomes and not the drivers of the business.
  • Such budgets do not anticipate the impact of unexpected business events, or cater for "what if" scenarios.
  • Information does not flow effectively across departments and individuals for co-ordinated decision-making or collaborative working
  • People cannot access available and relevant information to make the right business decisions at the right times.

Information Dispersal

  • Organisations invested in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to make key operational processes more efficient. However, ERP systems were not designed to answer business questions. They were designed to capture transactional data.
  • Organisations have also invested in other secondary systems, leading to information today being stored in differing formats spread across many and disparate sources, leading to islands of data and thus making management and reporting a complex, time consuming, inefficient process.
  • Organisations today need a simple to use reporting framework based upon integrated data. Working in a self-sufficient manner, users of performance management systems demand differing levels of reporting tools to address the questions posed by differing groups of business users.