AI is rapidly changing the game in the CPM landscape. As AI and CPM solutions become more integrated, CFOs explore a role shift among their team members: fewer manual and repetitive tasks and more room for analytics and consulting. How can AI add value to your CPM processes? How does this change the day-to-day work of finance professionals and speed up your business?
A corporate performance management solution is software for finance teams to streamline and automate important financial reporting processes like Financial Close and Consolidation, Financial Planning & Analysis, ESG Reporting, and Disclosure Management. Such solutions have been in the market for over 30 years now and have always promised key capabilities like:
- Improve data collection, quality, and validation
- Reduce manual and repetitive tasks by automation and digitization
- Create workflows, task management and improve controlled collaboration
- Enable analysis and insights into the numbers behind the numbers
- Improve forecast accuracy
- Simplify reporting
With AI integrated into your CPM solution, it strengthens the capabilities to live up to these promises. AI can speed up your business and make your people’s day-to-day jobs more interesting and challenging.
The possibilities of a CPM solution with integrated AI are growing every day, and they can be of value to your organization.
How? Let us inspire you with some examples:
1. Improve data collection, quality, and validation
AI can automate data-centered repetitive tasks like organizing data from multiple sources, dimensions, and types for analysis, identifying anomalies in extensive data sets, and reconciling information on behalf of finance teams. This highly increases the quality of your data, as machines are far better at identifying errors in spreadsheets with thousands of cells than the hardworking teams that have been staring at those numbers all day.
Here are some situations in which AI can be very helpful:
- Automatic data mapping of for example a new local G/L account to the Group Chart of Accounts used for reporting speeds up the reporting process, leaving more time for (strategical) analysis and decision-making.
- Detection of outliers in numbers based on historical information increases the quality and reliability of your data.
- AI can be trained using customized machine learning models focusing on operational data.
- An AI assistant helps you manage and analyze your data, which saves you a lot of time on tracing and converting information.
- Reduce manual and repetitive tasks by automation and digitization
The use of AI for automating and digitizing manual and repetitive tasks makes finance roles shift from data collection, crunching, and reconciliation to a more analytical and consulting perspective. No more spending hours and hours collecting data from various sources, matching and crunching the various data files, manually entering them, and pivoting in Excel. Doesn’t that sound good?
2. Create workflows, task management and improve controlled collaboration
Whereas creating workflows was already possible in most CPM solutions, AI can power up account reconciliation and transaction matching by making these workflows and tasks smarter and more interactive. This also decreases your dependence on IT specialists or consultants, for instance when you need a piece of code or a custom report.
AI can also be a driver for improved collaboration. Think of the new demands for organizations around ESG reporting and the EU regulations around CSRD. Integrated reporting and transparency combining financial performance with ESG performance is a key aspect of this. AI can help provide narratives on the numbers, improving the collaboration, understanding, and alignment between finance and sustainability teams.
3. Enable analysis and insights into the numbers behind the numbers
AI can handle volumes like no human ever can. Data trends identified by people usually have a linear and one-dimensional scope. Data trends identified by AI go much deeper, as the skills of AI to identify correlations between data types are much more sophisticated. For example, AI could not only tell you the trajectory of sales, but also identify the factors driving sales in that direction and show you how to change drivers to influence your sales performance. This creates more in-depth insights and relations and enables you to seize opportunities in an earlier stage.
Moreover, AI can determine the business drivers influencing your corporate performance so you can use that insight to refine your sales plan and strategy for the next quarter. For example, by asking your CPM tool a question using Generative AI. The answer can be generated as a direct response, report, or chart on a dashboard. This way, you could ask AI to pull results from your performance data and organize them in a way that is ready for you to analyze. Think of questions like:
- Why did our overhead for Amsterdam increase year over year?
- What was our highest profit center for 2024?
- What was the line of business with the highest Dutch sales last year?
4. Improve forecast accuracy
Most man-made forecasts are straightforward. You can project figures, but it is beyond our reach to consider all possible curve balls.
AI Machine Learning, however, can accurately make real-time or near real-time predictions based on large, complex data sets using its deep data exploration capabilities. With predictive analytics your forecasts become more accurate because a wide variety of financial, non-financial, and market data is considered in every projection. It provides the most sophisticated forecast from the historical time series data supplied.
It can also be a great help in Scenario Planning: creating and analyzing various business scenarios to anticipate on future uncertainties; from worst-case to best-case.
5. Simplify reporting
Besides creating reports through generative AI, AI can help finance teams clarify the story on tables, graphs, and figures. And turn financial reports into real-time and easy-to-grasp visual presentations. AI can generate complex and powerful content, like music, images, videos, and text. Generative AI has advanced to the point where it can extend its creative power to data visualization, preparing the results of its data exploration in graphs, charts, and tables. Thus providing comprehensible reports tailored to every level and target group.
6. AI, your finance team’s invaluable assistant
At cpmview, we understand that sustainable growth is of importance for your organization. Keep up with all developments and demands that add value to your business. Get the job done with less people in a labor market that’s more challenging than ever. By adding AI to your finance team, you’re giving them the ultimate helping hand. Not only by automating repetitive processes, but also by providing finance teams with access to data trends and performance insights that would otherwise be inaccessible, buried under the enterprise’s mass of unstructured data. This is possible if we embrace AI and make it work for you.
Do you want more information? Please do not hesitate to contact us. We are more than happy to share our thoughts and experiences with you. And to find out together how we can help you turn AI into an invaluable driver of your corporate performance strategy.