Below are some key points to determine your consulting partner has the experience and integrity to guide you to a successful EPM implementation and beyond:
- Provides thorough, concise and honest assessment of your current state and future road mapped options so your team can make quick decisions to properly move forward with confidence in a well-planned, phased approach
- Adept at gathering detailed specifications and providing timely hands-on education and guidance to your team to complete phased design and iterative build, test and rollout
- Propose and provide prototypes where warranted to quickly and cost effectively fit / gap the software to your future state needs
- Never accept vendor hype and overpriced pre-canned modules: Workforce, Capex, Project Financial Planning.
- Most pay to play Oracle platinum partners have it in their best interest to help the software sales representatives up-sell, leaving you in second place to overpriced and over hyped licensing and cloud subscription pricing schemes that are typically not the best fit for your incremental rollout requirements.
- By pushing pre-canned Forecast modules they convince you to skip the proper design analysis effort that ensures the application and model provide your true reporting and epm analytics requirements. We never skip this critical step with our clients as it is key to a successful application and adoption.
Ensure they provide experts in all areas required to deliver a complete solution, including
Delivery history – select a consistent team with a solid past success track record – We have delivered 100+ successful EPBCS / Hyperion Planning / Essbase implementations to date. Industry experience is a plus, but more importantly how many successful customers and applications the team has delivered displays ability to work properly thru each clients specific design requirements and train and mentor the team to a successful rollout.
- Design – Fast, Iterative and cost-effective requirements gathering and design phase keeps the impact to your project budget and team’s time minimized to maximize investment in functionality and training
- Fast-track and iterative model build, calculation and report design and build, completing unit testing and user testing processes to ensure delivery of financial reporting and analytics your organization requires is completed on plan
- Deep Essbase knowledge and best practice multi-dimensional model design ensures a scalable and easy to use reporting model with optimized performance
- Highly experienced in data integration to ensure that mapping and loading of each new data source is quickly and correctly completed:
- Successfully integrated many industry leading sources including:
- Netsuite
- Oracle EBS
- PSFT
- SAP
- Great Plains
- Epicor
- Salesforce
- Workday
- Skilled in successfully integrating custom data sources if required
- Successfully integrated many industry leading sources including:
Ensure the partner team has strong experience with efficient redesign / rebuild due to:
- GL/Source, Business model or forecast reporting changes
- Acquisition driven updates
- Expertise in rescuing projects built by a partner who might have been an Oracle crony platinum / gold partner not very focused on your application’s success or switched their team during the project to the B bench that couldn’t deliver
- Focus on identifying key pain points and gaps and quickly iterate with your team thru the correct solution option