Many companies are looking to replace their consolidation and planning legacy systems. Is this your case?
Starting in the Arborsoft days, continuing through the Hyperion, and then Oracle era, two products have achieved considerable market adoption: Hyperion Planning (Essbase) and Hyperion Financial Management (HFM). Every company looking for a planning or consolidation solution made sure to investigate Hyperion Planning and HFM and a lot of them ultimately purchased and implemented these two products as a long term solution to meet their CPM needs.
Even if neither product was perfect, they did have a significantly higher level of functionality than the competition. But over time, the complexity, integration and scalability issues, tilted the cost/benefit balance. The market has changed, and significantly, so has Oracle’s product strategy.
Oracle is turning the page.
They have created new, Cloud-based, products meant to replace their on-premises solutions, namely, Financial Consolidations and Close Cloud Service (FCCS) and Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS). While these new products pose some advantages, they also have material functional losses.
Astute companies will quickly realize that FCCS and PBCS are not evolutions of the current HFM and Planning offerings, but rather different products, forcing them to treat the replacement strategy as a net new vendor/product selection process.
What choices do these companies have? Are there other vendors that offer better alternatives to FCCS and PBCS?
In short, yes! There are some established vendors that should be considered every time one contemplates moving on from HP and HFM.
But how to find out the best product fit for your needs?
Ask yourself:
- What solutions are you currently using for budgeting, planning & forecasting, consolidation & reporting/financial close, disclosure management, profitability analysis, analytics, ERP, DWH, etc, and is it cloud or on premise?
- What improvements are you looking for to overcome current shortcomings in your software?
- What improvements are you looking for to implement new requirements?
- Now knowing what you want, what is it that you can reuse from your current solution to migrate?
The one path to the truth lies in looking beyond the marketing hype and digging into the details. Review the carefully weighed analyst write-ups, then take these products apart. Do your due diligence by peeling away the demo layers and the sales-speak to uncover what makes each product tick.
The functional differentiators will ultimately help you take a calculated risk based on actual facts — not sales drama.
- Before taking the final decision, check if you will have everything you need to really go beyond “historical” financial management. Think about future needs such as: Expanding while growing to meet statutory and regulatory needs with control and confidence
- Being scalable
- Being free to decide at any time cloud adoption or on-premise deployment
- Owning all the consolidation processes in one single solution
- An easy for all your sophisticated business and process requirements
Looking for alternatives you will find vendors such as CCH Tagetik that lastly helped companies such as Maus Freres and Europ Assistance move away from Hyperion Financial Management. For this reason, if you are thinking of replacing your HFM solution, start investigating CCH Tagetik.You can find a very comprehensive value proposition on this website that can help you project your business towards the innovation you need.