Increasingly, managers need to align their actions with strategic and operational objectives. And yet, too much information that is needed for decision making is unavailable – locked in disparate systems, seemingly too difficult to be calculated – and untapped in the company's knowledge workers. What's more, it's hard to be concerned with strategic objectives when the team is hampered by errors, time delays and costs associated with manual processes used to complete tactical processes.

arcplan helps improve business performance by improving management of key business processes – from inventory management to HR staffing, call center productivity management to budgeting and planning. It delivers a better way to systematically collect aggregate, access, analyze, and interact with meaningful information in the most complex environments.

Management processes become complex when they touch many points in your organization or when management decisions rely on a dependable, consistent view of the truth. The complexity lies in connecting many people and multiple systems, and in calculating and analyzing complicated performance ratios.

Most organizations already have financial applications that do a fine job with financial processes once the data are entered in a system-acceptable format. Yet those systems were not built to address the complexity that surrounds the marriage of operations and financial processes – getting scrubbed data from the field or from different systems into the financial application, completing complex calculations and sharing data throughout the company. When the business environment becomes too complex, issues arise, including:

• gaps form between systems, forcing costly manual effort to complete the process (manually extract data from one system to enter it into another; using error-prone spreadsheets to collect information; manually checking data validity)
• inability to drill into and interact with operational systems when questions arise and require further analysis and understanding, again requiring manual effort
• crucial but complex metrics are out of reach, because they need to be derived from multiple analytical and operational systems

arcplan bridges the gaps in performance management to deliver:

• Performance Scorecards and Dashboards – providing complex metrics using strategic, financial, and operational data
• Operational Performance Management – extending financial analysis to key operational environments to drive changes within the business
• Solution Templates Made Easy – With CFO Cockpit, a solution template based on arcplan Enterprise, financial managers have access to instant answers to crucial financial questions.