Still relying on guesswork and gut feelings for critical decision-making?

In official language (thanks Gartner), Corporate Performance Management (CPM) is a term used to describe the methodologies, metrics, processes, and systems used to monitor and manage your business performance. And to enable CPM, you need the tools to provide the functionality to support the aforementioned processes, methodologies, and metrics.  

CPM improves the ability of your organisation to resolve issues caused by disconnected data sets and analytical silos — then in turn you have data you and your team can trust. So, you can move from the old way of working where each department in the business did their own thing and looked to the past. Instead, you have a centralised way of planning where everyone can put their trust in an agreed set of data to make day-to-day decisions and create agility for long-term business planning. Forecasting no longer relies on guesswork and purely gut feel; it’s now easier to spot opportunities to save on costs, improve operational performance and identify problems before they turn into showstoppers.  

Done right, with the best CPM team and solutions (because one is nothing without the other), you can ensure that your organisation’s strategies and goals are not only executed — they are successful.

CPM applications matter — which is why we work with leading solution partners like IBM.

In fact, we are the only specialist CPM services provider in New Zealand to have earned IBM Platinum Partner status (IBM’s highest global accolade). Our team includes 11 chartered accountants, and several of our heavy hitters also hold IBM TM1/Planning Analytics Blackbelts (the pinnacle of technical accreditation). 

What sets our CPM practice apart is our customer experiences, our expertise, suite of solutions, our focus on our customers’ needs and the desire to improve their competitive edge. We can offer insight into your budgets, forecasting and workforce management, always moving you closer to your definition of success.

Our people understand the relationship between business, technology, and data. It’s our job to ask the tough questions and collaborate with our clients on the path of change (which is why we also embed Organisational Change Management in our services).

And our goal? To deliver you tangible outcomes and benefits both now and in the future as you embark on your own transformation.

While we are Fusion5’s newest practice, we’re now one of the largest, and most trusted and sought-after providers of CPM services in New Zealand. Today we support many of the NZX top 200 organisations and have a strong Public Sector footprint.

We mentioned ‘trust’ just a few lines ago — and we don’t use the word lightly. We often work with enterprises who’ve had their fingers burnt in previous technology engagements — so restoring their faith in the value that the right people and solutions can bring is critical.

For example — Fletcher Building, the largest building material supplier and construction company in Australasia. A few years before we partnered with them, they had upgraded their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) but continued to have double-handling issues, manual errors, and file mismanagement. They were wary of something similar happening with us, they simply couldn't trust their data or their processes. And given their experiences to date, we could fully empathise with their concerns.

So, we looked at their problems holistically. With our CPM expertise and industry-leading solutions, we enabled them to foresee delays in labour, resources, and equipment. Following, they could see disruptions ahead of time. This valuable foresight created a significant step change within the business in terms of their ability to adapt with their goals, data, and metrics in clear sight. And our CPM team supported them every step of the way.

Our work with Mitre10, the largest home improvement and garden retailer in NZ, was another example where we comprehensively addressed their challenges and overcame issues caused by past solutions that failed to deliver. However, we needed to prove to them, in a brief period of time, the value of their data and how we could use our technology to help them achieve success. To do this we integrated IBM’s renowned Planning Analytics with Watson platform, a multidimensional analysis application, to tailor a complete planning, budgeting, and forecasting model specific to Mitre10’s needs.

The result? The Mitre10 team can now plan and analyse data by store, department, sub-department and SKU. They have data automated from source, with configurable dashboards and views to ensure each user has easy access to the information they need to contribute. This increased the efficiency of their stores, and improved staff satisfaction (people could focus on higher value activities instead of manual processes), as well as the governance over their specific data.

Everybody uses data to substantiate every major strategic business decision that they make. And when they don’t have confidence in the figures, analytics, and reports in front of them, they supplement it with gut feel. A risky strategy at the best of times.

These days, guesswork can be confidently replaced with CPM and can augment gut feel. Now, your business outcomes and future success is based on certainty — not purely instinct.