Blog

  Achieving full optimization for business processes across the organization can be arduous.  With the support of technology as a tool to standardize, consolidate and automate, process optimization is attainable.    First, understand your business process.  Over time it is natural for processes to evolve and wander away from their original design and intent.  Determine if y ...

Companies often use Excel for budgeting, planning, forecasting and many other critical business processes.  As growth occurs, and the number of people interacting in a business process increases, manual errors, manual consolidation and a lack of the truth start to become major issues.  At the organizational level, business processes performed in spreadsheets become inefficient, ...

Oil and gas is a multifaceted, volatile global industry that experiences constant price fluctuations coupled with long periods of boom and bust. Reporting on financials is a cornerstone to this industry.  Today’s oil and gas companies are changing the way they approach budgeting and forecasting by leveraging flexible and powerful technology tools and solutions that provide agi ...

Altius CEO, Noel Phillips shares his thoughts on where he sees the direction of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) usage moving in businesses large and small. Noel Phillips:  The first thing I am seeing is a more iterative approach.  It used to be that companies were lucky to get through one or two cycles of a budget and forecast a year driven by the lack of available dat ...

When companies decide to invest money to acquire or upgrade fixed, physical, non-consumable assets, such as buildings or new equipment – each capital expenditure goes through an approval process. Many small to mid-sized companies (and even larger companies) tend to manage and track Authorization for Expenditure (AFE) requests and approvals in lengthy email strings and error-pr ...

Enterprise Performance Management solutions allow for dynamic scenario planning, which means that companies can quickly build scenarios, adjust plans, and make better strategic decisions for both the present and future.  This is particularly critical for companies in volatile markets like energy, where companies face distinct short-term and long-term risks associated with fluctuating oil prices.

Altius' meta-analysis capabilities allow companies to create business value and a competitive advantage through improved understanding of their own data—at both the process and people/user level.  These analyses can be immensely helpful in identifying key areas of the business process that need work or improvement (as well as identifying people that might be consistently contributing to those issues), and finding appropriate solutions.  Most Enterprise Performance Management vendors do not provide this critical piece of the process-management puzzle.

Many companies who have taken the plunge and implemented corporate performance management software are not seeing return on their investment. While CPM solutions have come a long way in recent years; helping companies to achieve process automation, collaboration and consolidation across their performance management processes, we often see those same companies struggling with re ...

This past Thursday, Microsoft pulled the current back on their activities for SQL Server 2016 at their Data Driven event in New York. Among the new capabilities built into SQL Server 2016announced, were:   Business Intelligence for every employee on every device – including new mobile BI support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices Advanced analytics using new R supp ...

The cloud makes enterprise-planning solutions affordable for companies that may not have the funding for an on-premise solution. Its software-licensing model utilizes a subscription format, allowing the investment to be spread over time, versus a lump sum payment up front. Cloud deployments also reduce the level of technical resource requirements, hardware and system costs. So ...