Every organisation, regardless of sector or industry, constantly tries to become more profitable. For some, that means improving efficiencies in their operations, while for others, it means expanding into new markets. Whether a company wants to tweak how it does things, or it wants to completely reinvent itself, everything the organisation does is driven by a plan to help ensure it can achieve its goals.

For decades, planning was done on an annual cycle. However, as the pace of business has increased, planning cycles have had to become more frequent. Today, quarterly and monthly planning cycles are commonplace, with some companies even trying to achieve weekly planning goals.

Most CFOs will tell you that this makes their already challenging jobs even harder and is one of the primary reasons that they are investing in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions. However, as they have started implementing EPM into their planning operations, CFOs have started discovering how much more this technology has to offer.

It’s All About the Data

Traditional corporate financial management methods, software, and technology such as Excel, legacy software systems, and in-house applications seldom satisfy the sophisticated requirements of modern businesses. Whether it’s consolidations and reporting, budgeting, strategic planning, or financial modelling engagements, companies are looking to EPM to help them eliminate inefficiencies and to gain real-time visibility into company performance.

Most companies gather data in silos, requiring a lot of manual effort to collate and raising the risk of data mistakes and inconsistencies. EPM provides an integrated platform to gather and absorb data from many sources, analyse it in detail, and generate actionable plans. This allows employees from various departments inside a company to work together in real time to build strategic goals and propel the company forward.

With the integration of AI functionality, EPM solutions are now making it even easier to turn company data into a holistic view of an organisation’s performance. By making it simpler to find and utilise information in the system and making the information more available to users throughout the company, AI can also improve the quality of insights.

In addition to eliminating mundane, repetitive, manual, task-based, non-value-added work in connected EPM systems, AI helps financial professionals and planners detect unusual patterns that may deviate from expected results. In addition, it can identify significant deviations in forecasts by measuring the variance between future scenarios.

The Future of EPM

Companies globally are abandoning traditional spreadsheets for EPM solutions, and some have taken it a step further, leveraging the benefits offered by EPM systems that have AI built in. Apps Run the World’s latest survey found that companies that are marrying EPM with artificial intelligence and machine learning are experiencing faster time to insight, a significant productivity increase, and a new level of enterprise-wide collaboration, which used to be inconsistent at best.

36% of the companies surveyed say that they extensively use Machine Learning (ML) for enterprise planning. Another 34% are considering ML adoption in the next 12-24 months. 61% believe ML will lead to a fundamental shift in the planning process of their organisation. The survey found that ML-enabled planning accelerates enterprise productivity ranging from 10% to a remarkable 10-fold jump in certain use cases.

When integrated properly into an EPM system, AI allows finance professionals to close faster, detect anomalies in trend analysis, and improve reconciliations and insights. Processes that previously required weeks to complete can now be completed in days, or in some cases, even hours. This is also enabling finance leaders to connect plans from other areas of the business, allowing them to use the shared data to create better insights, while AI-driven forecasts help support better decision-making.

There are many other benefits to AI-enabled EPM systems. For example, zero-balance reconciliations can be completed automatically, giving finance staff more time to reconcile key items that have a greater impact on the month-end financials. Another popular use case is stopping financial fraud. This has traditionally been very challenging due to the sheer volume of events and false alarms, but AI can systematically analyse all activities, identifying and alerting system users of potentially fraudulent behaviour.

AI can transform the standard decision-making process by providing senior executives with immense data processing power, pattern recognition, and analytics capabilities. Helping to ensure that all objectives throughout an organisation are aligned with the business’s overall strategic goals, AI-enabled APM solutions can make sure that every task and initiative is helping drive the organisation toward success.