Two key trends are converging and driving the adoption of new software tools in financial applications:
•cloud computing platform technology has matured to the point that it is now mainstream, and has fundamentally lowered the barriers to scale and made new solutions instantly horizontal and global for enterprise customers.
•the increasing “consumerization” of enterprise software.
The Quest to Uncover Hidden Trends
Today, new cloud computing-based applications are re-aggregating the intelligence that was lost when business processes were chunked off in bits and pieces and neatly folded into pre-packaged software worlds such as ERP, CRM and HRO. The reality is business processes don’t fold into clean parcels that can be hyphened off into different containers.
An OTC (order to cash) process, for instance, spans CRM to ERP to 3PL to RMS. Dynamic credit analysis at order time can drive bad debt reduction at collections. Predictive analytics of payment performance can help identify high-risk customers. Days past due (DPD) modeling can drive more accurate cash forecasting, and in turn working capital optimization. In each of these cases, the data exists – but is invariably locked away across different and multiple applications such as CRM, ERP, Excel and Outlook.
In the past, trying to pull all this information together in a meaningful fashion has been challenging. To start, the multi-application data spread and the cascading-stack depth of data creates a noise-to-signal ratio problem, and without the right application, makes it difficult to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. In addition, root cause analysis of systemic issues doesn’t follow pre-set and previously known paths, and static representations of enterprise data are useless. The need is for an interactive application that dynamically responds to the changing queries of the user as they uncover hidden trends and seek new intelligence.
