Leading the Way: Integrated FP&A in Cloud ERP

At their most essential level, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions help businesses streamline their budgeting, planning, modeling, forecasting and management reporting. Effective FP&A solutions empower businesses to make smart decisions faster, while keeping an eye on the longer term, big-picture possibilities. Epicor was pleased to be named for the 10^th Consecutive Year in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for ERP, 2024. Of the ten reports in which Epicor was named this year, three of them addressed AI and finance.*

When done well, FP&A tools help ensure that companies make informed financial choices about everything from cutting costs to investing in new opportunities, while remaining on track with their key financial goals. Some of the ways FP&A software can help drive business performance include:

• Accuracy: Produces precise and reliable financial data, helping finance teams to make more informed decisions.
• Automation: Eliminates many of the manual processes involved in financial planning and analysis, saving time and minimizing errors.
• Collaboration: Facilitates collaboration among different departments and stakeholders within a company.
• Forecasting: Uses advanced predictive capabilities, enabling finance teams to create accurate and reliable forecasts of future financial performance.
• Reporting: Provides access to customizable reports and dashboards, making it easy for finance teams to communicate financial performance to stakeholders.
• Scenario planning: Empowers finance teams to easily create different scenarios and test the impact of different assumptions on financial performance.

The FP&A market also includes cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions from ERP vendors. These solutions help provide deep integration at the data and end-user layers. FP&A solutions use the data collected by the ERP system to analyze the company's financial health—looking at trends, comparing actual performance to budgets, and forecasting future financial performance. These capabilities provide a clearer “lens” into ERP data, while helping to improve the cadence at which organizations plan and forecast for upcoming business cycles.

Why FP&A in ERP Matters

Cloud SaaS ERP enables real-time posting of transactional data into core finance modules and consumption, helping to strengthen forecasting. Because ERP FP&A solutions are tightly integrated with core financials, they allow users to drill back to transaction line items. This can increase efficiencies in results analysis, streamline financial data management, and enhance planning accuracy. In addition, having all financial data in one system reduces errors and helps ensure consistency.

Success Drivers

Companies are increasingly migrating to cloud-based ERP solutions, especially those in service-centric businesses. Maintaining consistency within your existing ERP system offers several benefits:

• For those customers yet to transition to the cloud, adding an FP&A solution to your current ERP can be a good way to experience the advantages of these tools before the migration.
• Replacing time-consuming, spreadsheet-driven, manual planning processes with a modern solution can be a game-changer for businesses today, particularly in an increasingly changeable marketplace.
• Leveraging more intuitive insights, driven by emerging technologies like AI and machine learning, can help drive frictionless planning and analysis—increasing the business case for adding FP&A tools to your current system.
• Investment in ERP-integrated FP&A can also serve as the gateway into extended planning and analysis (xP&A), where both operational planning and forecasting encompass other areas of the business beyond finance.

Opportunities

Even businesses who are convinced of the benefits of integrated FP&A systems may still face some challenges before arriving at company-wide buy-in:

• Although awareness of cloud ERP systems continues to grow, there is still a reluctance among many businesses to move on from legacy systems, even in the face of less-than-ideal FP&A capabilities.
• The shortcomings of legacy systems may be particularly apparent in planning and forecasting processes. Despite the acknowledged need for a more efficient solution, businesses may still face change management challenges and hesitancy among employees.
• In addition, companies that are in a multi-ERP environment may be considering a third-party solution (disconnected from a specific ERP), in order to meet the needs of a variety of ERP instances.

User Recommendations

When your business is ready to explore integrated solutions, it’s important to keep a few guidelines in mind:

• Irrespective of the data integration capabilities, it’s vital that the solution you choose meets your most critical business planning and forecasting requirements.
• Leverage the FP&A capabilities within an ERP solution provider’s product portfolio to explore superior integration for data and user interface.
• If working with a best-of-breed FP&A solution currently, consider the ERP-vendor solution as part of the future application roadmap for your business; the integrated ERP version may be far superior and worth the trade-off. Explore the information policies of your business application provider (and those in the cloud) regarding setting and stewarding the data used in the application or suite.

Staying one step ahead of current and future financial performance lets you continuously monitor the strength and potential of your business. Of the eight Gartner Hype Cycles in which Epicor was named a vendor, three of them were related to AI and finance.*

Integrating FP&A with an ERP system gives businesses a uniquely powerful edge for planning, analyzing, and managing their finances more effectively.

*Gartner, Hype Cycle for ERP, 2024, Neha Ralhan, Denis Torii, Greg Leiter, Dixie John, 17 June 2024.

*Gartner, Hype Cycle for Finance AI and Advanced Analytics, 2024, Mark D. McDonald, 1 August 2024.

*Gartner, Hype Cycle for Revenue and Sales Technology, 2024, Guy Wood, Adnan Zijadic, Melissa Hilbert, Ilona Hansen, Varun Agarwal, 17 June 2024.

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Epicor.

Marco de Vries

VP, Product Marketing

Marco de Vries is a seasoned Product Marketing executive with 25 years of experience in strategy, go-to-market, and SaaS. Expert in supply chain and integration for diverse industries like Manufacturing and Healthcare.

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