Harvest data from your entire business

The current status quo for some

As companies have been using their CPM platforms for a while now, rich data has been created and collected there. Most of our clients have been reporting from their CCH Tagetik environments for several years now. Within this environment their financial statements can be viewed from intersections between dimensions such as: Companies, Costcenters, Lines of Business, Products, and Projects. But getting to share this knowledge with the people steering the business is not always optimally configured. In order to consume this data on a lower level within the business, experience and investment into the inner workings of the platform is required.

On the other hand, there is the PowerBI environment where easy to use dashboards can be defined and analyzed. But getting the data into PowerBI can be a challenge. A proper connection would, for example, not only bring in the financial data, but also the reporting structures. So the administration is centered into the platform where most of the business logics are. The ability to create your own reports is not without risks, however. Improper use of visualizations can lead to misinterpretations, which should be avoided. Just ask two analysts to create a visual out of some data, and most often you will receive two different visualizations.

Different Methods

There are methods however to prevent that. Just think about it, if a composer from Argentina creates a masterpiece, a musician from China is able to play it. Why shouldn’t you use a standard for visualisation within your own company? The good news is that there already is a standard for it: the International Business Communication Standards, better known as IBCS. And wouldn’t it be nice if the consumption of your reports would automatically follow these standards? While ideal, some companies are not yet able to correctly disclose their vast collection of data in such a way.

Getting to where you want

In order to get to the situation described in the opening of this article, two essential pieces of the puzzle must be found. Firstly, you need expertise in CCH Tagetik to disclose the proper data and expertise in PowerBI to not only successfully visualize. But also adhere to the standards, so you can significantly improve the efficiency of your analysis and the accuracy of your decisionmaking[1]. Now you can invest into these two roles separately, but you can also buy it off the shelf.

Over at Finext, we invested into these two pieces already and came up with our official CCH Tagetik to PowerBI connector. An off-the-shelf product that you can install in your CCH Tagetik and PowerBI environment to periodically send all required data from your system of record to your dashboarding platform. And with the use of the ZebraBI plug-in in addition to our connector you can make sure that all reports follow the IBCS methods, increasing the accuracy and efficiency of data consumption within your departments too. The standardisation of the product makes it easily implementable: within a few days you can roll out to your end-users. You probably spend more time deciding on whether to do it than to actually do it.

The benefits

So in short, connecting your company with its data allows you to get the following:

• Centralizing your end-users in PowerBI allows them to consume data in their own way, following business standards, which also has a more financially friendly license model than most EPM platforms
• The finance department becomes a real sparring partner for the business, allowing to support a much broader audience with their vast amounts of data
• A severe reduction in reliance on spreadsheets gives your data consumers much more overview, flexibility and ability to deep-dive than massive reporting packs

Want to learn more?

We tell our story in a series of videos. In these three videos we look at the proposition from three angles:

1. A broad overview of the product, pricing and use cases for Executive Professionals
2. An in-depth view of the product for Financial Professionals using CCH Tagetik
3. An in-depth view of the product for Dashboarding Professionals using PowerBI

Choose whichever angle suits you best and come explore the endless possibilities with us. If you want to skip ahead of the queue and want to talk directly to us about it, let us know by leaving your contact details in the box below.

[1] Research by the University of Munich has shown that the efficiency of analysis improves by +46% and the accuracy of decisionmaking improves by +61% when using the standards of IBCS in your reporting.