Longview recently completed the acquisition of Tidemark Systems, a planning software vendor. Longview Plan powered by Tidemark is a suite of cloud-based applications that enable corporations to plan, assess performance and communicate results more effectively. The software facilitates what Ventana Research calls “continuous planning.” This is a highly collaborative, action-oriented approach to planning that relies on frequent, short cycles to rapidly create and update integrated company-wide operational and financial plans. This structural approach makes it easy for individual business functions to create their own plans while enabling headquarters to connect those plans to create a unified view. Viewed in the long term, this acquisition provides Longview with a platform that will enable it to apply its existing on-premises intellectual property to a broader suite of web-based performance management and tax applications.
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Topics:
Mobile,
Office of Finance,
Recurring Revenue,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
Sales Planning and Analytics
Ventana Research defines financial performance management (FPM) as the process of addressing the often overlapping people, process, information and technology issues that affect how well finance departments operate and support the activities of the rest of their organization. FPM deals with the full cycle of finance department activities, which include planning and budgeting, analysis, assessment and review, closing and consolidation, internal financial reporting and external financial reporting, as well as the underlying information technology systems that support them.
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Topics:
Mobile,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Recurring Revenue,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
Sales Planning and Analytics
Zuora, a subscription commerce and billing software company, recently acquired Leeyo, a company that provides software that automates the revenue recognition and forecasting processes. The terms were not disclosed. The acquisition is relevant to subscription-based businesses because of changes to accounting standards about to go into effect that will have a significant impact on how they account for their revenue. Leeyo and Zuora already have been deployed together with multiple ERP systems. The combined company plans to tighten integration between the two going forward.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Continuous Planning,
Contact Center,
Financial Performance Management,
Enterprise Resource Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting
Anaplan recently held Anaplan Hub, its annual user group meeting. The company offers a cloud-based business planning platform that incorporates a modeling and calculation engine. The tool makes it relatively easy to add or expand the scope of plans that can be connected and monitored as a central source. Companies typically use Anaplan software for financial planning or budgeting, sales, workforce, marketing and IT planning. These are the types of plans in which companies often need to create models that incorporate their specific requirements, their strategy and their business systems.
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Topics:
Customer Analytics,
Human Capital Management,
Marketing,
Marketing Performance Management,
Office of Finance,
Recurring Revenue,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
HRMS,
Sales Performance Management,
Workforce Management,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Work and Resource Management,
Operations & Supply Chain,
Sales Enablement and Execution,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
Sales Planning and Analytics
Pricing is an issue that affects almost every for-profit company that doesn’t sell purely commodity products. A corporation’s approach to pricing can range from highly disciplined to ad hoc and from fully centralized to decentralized. The issue of centralized or decentralized depends a great deal on the markets the company serves, its organizational structure and its culture. However, a disciplined approach to price setting and negotiation is always superior to an ad hoc approach. This is especially true for non-commodity B2B businesses, which I believe have lagged other types of business in managing their pricing strategically. (Some would argue that there is no such thing as a pure commodity business, but that’s another issue.) Increasing pricing discipline in the company is one way for the CFO to engage more strategically in managing the business.
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Topics:
Big Data,
Office of Finance,
Continuous Planning,
Analytics,
Sales Performance Management,
Financial Performance Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Pricing and Promotion Management,
Sales Enablement and Execution,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
Sales Planning and Analytics
