Tidemark Earns Top Rankings in BARC 2020 Planning Survey

Tidemark has been announced as a market leader by BARC for providing the most out-of-the-box and pre-defined planning application content, while also offering industry accelerators for customers and their implementations. Additionally, Tidemark was lauded for achieving faster implementations and sharing best practices for customers to maximize their effectiveness and success.

The BARC Planning Survey is an annual report that includes findings on software products within the EPM and planning space. It has grown in participation and industry clout over the years and now includes most of the key vendors that provide planning and EPM functionality to organizations.

Tidemark received a total of four Top Ranks and nine Leading Positions in the report:

Tidemark’s Top-Ranked KPIs – Why Do We Care?

The following section will explain the two KPIs that Tidemark received top marks in, and what exactly driver-based planning and workflows are in the context of planning, as well as the benefits and value gained by employing these approaches in corporate planning.

Driver-Based Planning

Driver-based planning bases financial plans on operational drivers.

This model for planning is the best practice approach and ensures an organization is constructing their plans, forecasts, and/or budgets based on key business and value drivers. Driver-based planning bases operate on real, operational numbers generated by the business. If these numbers change, as in the event of a global pandemic, the plans can be reforecasted or recalculated by simply changing the underlying drivers, which will calculate the details of the plan in real time with a simple push of a button.

Benefits of Driver-Based Planning

• Provides better accuracy of plans, forecasts, and budgets
• Promotes higher confidence in numbers due to transparency in the source of plans
• Saves substantial time/effort in budgeting and forecasting in the initial creation of the budgets and also in updating their forecasts throughout the year
• Generates more iterations of plans and forecasts
• Allows executives to understand the true value-drivers or levers of their business and how changing them can impact future business performance
• Speeds up decision making by providing visibility into what is truly moving financial results
• Identifies correlations and the cause-effect relationships between drivers and their associated outcomes
• Provides an agile planning environment for quick and dynamic reforecasts in the event of major changes in business assumptions
• Enhances collaborative planning and supports the finance organization as a true strategic partner of the business
• Decreases time spent on non-value-adding activities for finance
• Changes the conversation of the organization, forcing the discussion to turn to operational driver-based activities, such as the value-chain of the business and how the assumptions impact business performance

Workflow

A workflow is a system of managing a process that includes approvals, rules, audits, and the general flow of all related dependencies.

For planning, workflow can dramatically change how an organization manages their budgeting and forecasting processes. Historically, the process was managed manually by finance through documentation, portals, emails, spreadsheets, and paper trails.

Tidemark provides an automated way to manage these planning processes, bringing the flow, approvals, rules, and auditing into the software, freeing up finance to focus on value-adding activities.

Benefits of Workflow

• Provides greater visibility into the overall business process flow of the planning process
• Reduces errors in plan submissions due to a simple submission and approval process
• Eliminates the need for rekeying data through automation of data sources and inputs
• Increases transparency, and therefore confidence, in the numbers and process for the plan
• Incorporates users from all areas of the organizations, making sure all users can input their plans, not just those who are well-versed in Excel
• Speeds up the submission process and provides ability to generate more versions of the forecast or budget
• Frees up finance to focus on more value-adding activities
• Improves communication through the collaboration and annotation features of the product, providing faster decision making
• Retains data- and submission-related history records through audit capabilities
• Secures data and processes so that people only see the processes, steps, dimensions, members, and data that they are responsible for, thereby simplifying the process

Reshape your Organization’s Future Growth with the #1 Leader in the Market

The Office of Finance and the role of the CFO continue to change and move to more of a vital, strategic role within an organization, managing the finances and financial processes, but also affecting key decision making and the strategic direction of the entire organization.

Tidemark helps medium and large enterprises transform their business with cloud-based planning, forecasting, and analytic applications that work for everyone on any device. Tidemark extends planning beyond the CFO’s office to the front lines of every business decision-maker. Tidemark provides a powerful and scalable platform in which your planning solution is based upon your own business processes, not some legacy cube or database. Every decision maker is empowered, from finance to operations to business line managers, with better data, deeper analysis, and a richer experience, enabling financial intelligence for the enterprise.

Check out how Tidemark and its award-winning solution can support the most complex and volatile organizations and business climates.