Key Takeaways from the Global CPM Trends and Priorities Report

Many businesses are racing to improve their corporate performance management (CPM) systems, or what we at Planful call financial performance management (FPM), to drive faster, more reliable planning. It’s no longer a luxury to embrace cloud-based solutions—it’s a necessity to stay competitive.

But how far along are companies in adopting these changes? A new report from BARC and BPM Partners highlights where businesses are making progress and falling behind. The data and analysis, gathered from over 1,300 participants (primarily from Europe, including the U.K. and Germany, and North America) across industries, is designed to help organizations benchmark progress in planning and performance management efforts.

The Global CPM Trends and Priorities Report 2025 offers a clear look at how companies approach CPM and their next steps to stay ahead. Let’s look at a few of the top takeaways from the research study in detail.

Challenging, uncertain, and volatile are adjectives that have been used for years to describe our ongoing economic environment.

That has encouraged many organizations to bolster planning capabilities, especially by updating older software with more modern and capable solutions.

Moving to cloud-based CPM has been a key trend over the past several years. However, just 42% of organizations in Europe are using cloud-based CPM, well behind North America (68%) and Asia (62%), according to the report.

Companies who aren’t leveraging the cloud miss out on time and cost-saving features like predefined planning applications, which cloud vendors deliver faster. This agility is key to staying competitive in a rapidly changing market.

Integrating financial consolidation with planning allows finance and accounting teams to align actuals with forecasts, reduce manual work, and boost data accuracy. As a result, this approach speeds up close cycles to give executives and budget owners the real-time insights they need to make quick, informed decisions, especially in dynamic markets.

When you gain a single source of truth, it also simplifies regulatory compliance, multi-entity reporting, and intercompany transactions — reducing risk and building trust in the numbers. With this structure, finance teams can more easily produce audit-ready reports and maintain compliance across jurisdictions without the typical heavy lifting.

An integrated platform strengthens collaboration across departments, allowing operations, finance, and strategy teams to work from a shared data foundation. This reduces operational complexity and offers a scalable solution that adapts as an organization grows—whether preparing for expansion, M&A activities, or reinforcing financial controls.

By freeing up time previously spent on data aggregation, finance teams can focus on higher-value work, such as strategic analysis and forecasting.

Mi Hub, a multinational supplier of corporate clothing and uniforms, felt the pressure to modernize its CPM. With multiple ERP systems to contend with, it created a manual, spreadsheet-based process that took a week or more each month.

“The data coming from the ERPs was incomplete, so we had to reconstruct it in Excel,” recalled Mark Hobbs, Head of FP&A at Mi Hub. “I was doing that in a massive Excel spreadsheet. It was all customized, and only I knew how it worked. I was the single point of failure.”

But, once Mi Hub modernized to “something slick, something intuitive,” as Mark put it, the company cut three days from that monthly effort.

“If you asked any CFO if they’d pay to get results three days earlier, one version of the truth, and a balance sheet that always balances, it’s a no-brainer to move to Planful,” Mark said.

Read more: Mi Hub Cuts 3 Days from Monthly Close and Consolidation With Planful. 

The authors of the report, Dr. Christian Fuchs, Senior Analyst Data & Analytics at BARC, and Craig Schiff, CEO at BPM Partners, use their combined experience to identify six “hot spots” to watch in today’s CPM market, along with recommendations on how best to embrace the trends uncovered in the report.

You’ll see the hot spots, such as using cloud-based CPM and the growing popularity of AI and predictive technologies, reflected in the survey results and broken out by Europe, North America, and Asia/Pacific regions. Their recommendations also offer tips for integrating planning efforts, evaluating the AI capabilities of CPM solutions, and how to boost planning productivity.

Download Global CPM Trends and Priorities Report 2025 to get full insights and learn how your team can capitalize on these trends today.