What Kind of Return to Expect from an EPM Investment

Before exploring financial performance management solutions for your enterprise, it’s crucial to assess your current processes. Understanding where you stand helps gauge your needs and identify opportunities for improvement. Start by asking yourself and your team these critical questions:

• Are we bogged down with manual processes that take hours out of the day?
• Are we more likely to react to changes in the business vs. anticipate and proactively prepare for them?
• Do we spend too much valuable time troubleshooting spreadsheet errors?
• Are budgets built in a silo in finance without the collaboration of other departmental leadership?

If you answered “Yes!” to any of these, it’s time to consider modernizing your financial processes. Tools like Planful can help optimize financial planning processes, streamline workflows, and drive better business outcomes. To understand Planful’s full impact on our customers, we partnered with Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study examining the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the Planful platform. The results? Aggregated interviews and data from midsize enterprise customers and presented compelling statistics, including a 393% ROI in productivity improvement. Let’s take a look at those results in detail.

The quantifiable financial impact of Planful’s EPM solution

The study conducted by Forrester revealed the quantifiable benefits of enterprise performance management (EPM) for finance organizations. A risk-adjusted net present value (NPV) was determined for benefits that were realized with the implementation of Planful. Here are two highlights from the study:

Increased FP&A productivity

By eliminating manual modeling and reporting, FP&A teams gained productivity equivalent to five full-time employees. This improvement translated into a $731,630 value over three years.

Increased efficiency for budget managers

With Planful, FP&A associates were able to provide more accurate budgets related to sales goals. Budget managers then trusted the numbers provided by finance and could easily collaborate with their finance peers instead of building a new budget from scratch. The review process and revisions also took less time. This increase in efficiency for the budget manager over three years has a business value of $270,016.

The unquantifiable benefits of investing in Planful

Forrester’s study also captured the qualitative benefits of investing in Planful, which undeniably improves the financial performance of our customers. Throughout the study, Forrester incorporated accurate comments from interviewees that outlined many of the unquantifiable benefits of EPM.

• Faster close cycles: Teams close the books quicker, freeing time for strategic activities.
• Improved employee retention: By shifting from repetitive tasks to impactful collaboration, finance teams experienced higher job satisfaction.

The study clearly demonstrates the value our customers feel when using Planful’s EPM solution to improve their financial processes, from closing the books faster to employee retention. One customer summed it up perfectly regarding employee retention, an often-overlooked benefit: “Planful improves the career pathing with FP&A whenever we can get out and actually work with the different organizations instead of chasing numbers; we are confident and comfortable working with the business leaders as the trusted business advisor.”

Making the case for investing in Planful’s EPM solution

The study confirms that organizations using Planful see a 393% return on investment over a three-year period, based on real interviews with our customers. The findings make a compelling case for modernizing your financial processes with Planful. Download the Forrester TEI study to learn the business value our customers realize from using Planful. Or, book a demo to see Planful in action.