WHY ESSATTO?

Making Strategic Decisions

In the context of running a successful business organisation, top decision-makers in a well-run company recognise that a key challenge today is the ability to make quick, well-informed and relevant decisions that will place their company strategically and competitively ahead of their rivals.

Businesses have always been competitive, but very much more so in today’s globalised world. It would be a luxury to sit back and ponder over decisions.

Working with traditional, though trusted procedures to deliver the required data and information upon which decisions are made may seem less expensive but speed is lost. Depending on reports being generated by various but un-integrated source systems for which substantial investments have been previously made, will certainly not optimise these investments.

A catalyst has to be employed to exploit all available material, financial and human resources to effectively assist the corporate decision-makers; only then can decision-making become strategic in nature rather than just being intuitive.

 The Framework For Strategic Decision-Making

Many progressive companies today adopt a business performance management (BPM) process as a standard management practice to fast track decision-making and optimise business performance. 

BPM is focussed on business processes such as planning, budgeting and forecasting. These processes have now been increasingly regarded as an essential part of a well-managed and controlled company.

 Budgeting And Forecasting

Depending on the nature of their business, most companies adopt a 3 to 5 year corporate planning timeframe. From the corporate plan, an annual budget plan is derived.

A budget is usually a top-down set of business and financial targets to be achieved by a company over the next 12 months of a financial year. The targets set are normally accompanied by planned events and activities as well as the necessary interventions required to achieve them. These interventions can only happen if the management is able to monitor and forecast the on-going business activities and financial results over the budget period and beyond.

Forecasting then becomes very important to ensure the desired budget outcome can be met through using new strategies and business tactics. 

It can thus be seen that forecasting produces an objective and realistic assessment of the various potential outcomes of planned targets on the basis of the actual trends, the most current business performance and the latest assumptions made without intervention by management.

As a consequence of its ability to practise forecasting, the company is able to be forewarned on the type and level of interventions required to get its targets on track once again or is able to quickly communicate with corporate policy makers and investors if lower expectations are inevitable.

Some other benefits that forecasting can bring forward are:-

· Determining the key value and cost drivers to enable appropriate performance measures to be     developed

· Identifying operational and management strengths and weaknesses through a set of KPI measurements which can help monitor and improve performance of business unit managers as well as to determine accountability and rewards.

· Enabling corporate treasurers and financial managers to optimise company cash-flow and financial planning, and

· Forming the basis of subsequent year’s budget plans through practising a 15 to 18 months ‘rolling’ forecasts.

CEOs and CFOs all over the world are being increasingly held accountable by shareholders, investors and regulators for their performance based on their business plans and forecasts. It stands to reasons why companies must start adopting the best practice in budgeting and forecasting as well as invest in an effective budgeting and forecasting solution. Much reliance in still being placed on the use of spreadsheets which has a number of inadequacies, in particular its  lack of timeliness and its inability to effectively perform scenario analysis.

 How Essatto Fits In

Essatto Business Performance Management Suite is a powerful business intelligence solution with superior aggregation performance that enables companies to realise their full business and profit potential through automating their budgeting and forecasting process.

Essatto is essentially a budgeting and forecasting system with critical ‘what-if’ analytical capability which helps identify a company’s key value and cost drivers and develop appropriate performance measures. It enables a company to plan and budget its performance effectively by articulating its KPIs and provides powerful price and volume variance analysis capabilities.

Essatto also incorporates strategic planning, product productivity, customer profitability, centres profitability and management reporting features as part of the solution. Whilst most other solutions focus on historical outcomes,  Essatto ® delivers this functionality for future outcomes.

Essatto provides quick roll-out and short implementation owing to the following features :-

*** It is pre-built (standard edition)      

*** Easy integration into existing applications

*** It comes with pre-packaged analytics

***It is easy to use with minimal training

It is cost-effective and  there is very low risk in its implementation,

It complements and does not replace existing IT investments already made by a company

It optimises the use of the vast amount of data already sitting in the company’s data warehouses and other support systems. Required data are electronically transferred over to the Essatto ®  system, releasing finance executives from being ‘scorekeepers’ to the more challenging and value-added role of financial analysts.

It provides better quality, reliable and scenario-driven information and prompt management reports to key decision-makers and when required to regulatory authorities,

Essatto ®  is useful both at enterprise (Group) level and business unit level.

At business unit level, Essatto ® ’s forecasting capabilities help to align key business functions and processes to ensure sales forecast are appropriately translated into requirements for operations.

In essence, Essatto ® enhances an organisation’s financial intelligence capability and decision-making process. It also provide better transparency through the speed, quality and accuracy of its forecasts and highlights material events and their financial implications to corporate policy makers and the market.