One of the greatest impediments to workflow efficiency during this period of disruption is the loss of impromptu chats.
No longer can you readily have a casual chat with your team, and ‘touch-base’, or easily keep abreast of the going-ons. It now requires a back-and-forth flurry of instant messages, sporadic bursts of communication, or longer scheduled zoom calls and meetings losing all sense of informality.
Managing a large team has never been more challenging.
With a broadly distributed remote team, keeping relevant users updated with quickly changing information, or centralising key information can prove needlessly challenging. The flow of information has become disrupted, negatively impeding the ability to make time-critical decisions.
The decentralisation of information has further compounded the challenges of problem-solving, workplace efficiency, and decision making. The forensic accounting challenge of finding the source of a discrepancy has blown out massively.
Where once you could rely on the presence and advice of your colleagues, offhandedly asking them for files or data immediately, now it requires an email, a phone call, a request - an additional layer and barrier to making the correct decision.
This challenge can become exacerbated due to the unforeseen circumstances such as a lack of digital collaboration tools (such as Zoom, or Teams) to undocumented policies surrounding personal computers accessing or utilising the organisation’s network.
Enter Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems.
EPM systems are designed to service the largest organisations in the world, assisting medium to large organisations across multiple departments and business units in overseeing and executing finance functions including; planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting on business performance, and the consolidation and finalisation of financial results.
It unifies a finance department’s reporting needs into a single platform.
How have large finance departments leveraged EPM?
One of the key advantages of EPM is user management and oversight. At the click of a button, managers can drill down into reports, ledgers, or leverage platform AI to identify anomalies or trends. Likewise, EPM systems allow organisations to enforce accounting standards and provide centralised documentation repositories, alleviating the challenges of forensic accounting.
This is part of the core benefit that EPM systems allow large organisations to take advantage of; a secure already-online finance suite, designed for scalability.
No longer is it necessary to request file transfers, sharing that 60MB Excel spreadsheet from a local drive, or micro-managing users who can update a single document. Instead, departments can ‘do it live’ working simultaneously online across a broad range of functions.
Sign up to our upcoming webinar, where we will be discussing the various Enterprise Performance Management solutions available and how organisations are currently leveraging these solutions for success.
If you’d like to find out more, click here.