Solution Overview

The i-nexus Financial Benefits Tracking and Forecasting solution essentially simplifies the complex task of aggregating the financial impact of the significant number of operational activities that impact the cash/profit forecast, enabling the finance function to prepare more quickly, with less effort, a more accurate financial forecast that is directly underpinned by the latest operational plans.

Key Challenges

1. Weak link between the goal cascade process and budgeting process. This means that cost reduction targets are often based into the budget, but the resources needed to achieve these targets are not included, i.e, the financial plans are inherently unachievable.
2. Significant administration overhead/complexity involved in manually collecting/reconciling and publishing different inputs needed to run the review process. This makes implementing this review process hard work. This creates the strong possibility that it will lose out in the day to day battle for resources to address urgent issues.
3. KPI tracking is problematic as there is no early warning system that an action is not progressing to plan. Furthermore it is difficult for senior/top management to intervene effectively and it is virtually impossible for them to understand if the cumulative effect of the identified actions will take them to the targeted endpoint. 
4. Due to the complexity of the plans being held in multiple spreadsheets, there is a lack of accountability of actions and visibility of progress. This ultimately translates to a lack of action and erosion of senior leadership commitment. The lack of integration between the budgeting process and GDP action also means the resources (money and staff) agreed in the budget do not align with/are inconsistent with the resources needed to execute the actions. The result is failure in execution of strategy.

i-nexus Financial Benefits Tracking Solution

1. i-nexus has the ability to prioritize cost reduction and investment opportunities.
2. i-nexus connects forecasts to milestones and allows costs to move relative to project completion date.
3. It has the ability to electronically engage finance to validate saving logic versus policy.
4. Projects can be structured into phases, allowing standardization of approach and consistency of progress reports.
5. ERP systems can be linked to source actual costs and actual savings per commodity.
6. i-nexus has the ability to consolidate benefits into a forecast against run rate to arrive a cost forecast.

Solution Benefits

Be in the position to answer the only question that matters - knowing where you are today vs target is important but knowing where you are likely to be against the promises that have been made to shareholders is essential. Will the current plan deliver the target results you expend? Engage and align the energy of every employee not just senior management, remove administrative complexities, ensure your plan remains realistic and you have the resources required to execute it and be in a position to hold managers accountable for the effective deployment of goals, not just their execution.