by Rob Jenkins, SAP Global Center of Excellence
In my previous blog, I discussed a variety of financial planning and tax modeling requirements and the disparate analytic tools finance teams are using to achieve their objective of partnering with the business to optimize decision making. Today, I want to discuss the rise (again) of profitability and cost management software.
For more than 20 years, profitability and cost management software has served a niche in 
finance and operations where organizations needed to model complex business rules of cost assignment, attribution and allocation in multiple process steps using driver volumes and multi-dimensional views. These data inputs often include financial values and non-financial measures by department, account, process, customer and/or product components in multiple layers all the way down to the bill-of-materials.
Gartner refers to this application space as Profitability Modeling and Optimization (PM&O) – part of corporate or enterprise performance management. These enterprise applications enable business users to use a point and click interface to rapidly build profitability and/or cost models and leverage built-in reports and OLAP (online analytical processing) multi-dimensional database for storage. Originally developed for activity-based costing purposes in the 1990’s, these PM&O applications have been adapted over the years to enable any methodology of complex revenue or expense allocation using a multi-dimensional database environment.
Organizations can transform source financial data where revenue and expense are typically captured in disparate dimensions into aligned, common dimensions. For example, revenue is captured by product and customer in a billing system whereas most expense is captured in the financial system by responsibility center without direct linkage to “market-facing dimensions.”
This transformation can incorporate robust rule sets that are visually depicted and easily maintained while accommodating large data sets. These types of models would be onerous to build, document, and maintain in spreadsheet software or would require IT to build a custom OLAP application with user interfaces and reporting tools.
Planning systems can be configured to import actual data and apply complex rule sets though the interface and dimensional data model are not pre-configured for multi-step, activity-based cost allocation purposes.
Integrating planning systems with profitability and tax impact modeling
PM&O applications can easily handle integrating budget, forecast or other scenario data using the version dimension. This enables alignment of planned financial data with actual results for revenue and cost following the mapping from resource center or account to process all the way to customer, product or other business dimension. Planned data can include financial data and driver-volumes or different capacity estimates if changes in operations or efficiencies are targeted.
PM&O applications have seen a recent resurgence given the applicability to modeling detailed operational transfer pricing rules. These rules are structurally very similar to activity-based methods and include robust, multi-step, driver-based allocation of shared cost pools along with the capability to model the detailed supply chain process steps and the tax impact based on jurisdiction, rates, etc
These applications can provide one integrated financial modeling solution that serves both FP&A and corporate tax enabling collaboration on inputs, rules and a single source of truth. With the proper configuration, an implementation team can create an accurate, documented view of pre-tax product / customer margin based on the true “economic map” of the business along with a tax-impacting process view of transfer prices, debt location, IP royalties and passive income.
The calculations can include actual results and “what-if” scenarios for the executive team to strategically organize global resources and operations.
So while taxes are a certainty, corporations will continue to deploy capital to maximize after-tax return on investment and finance organizations will be able to continue to use technology to be a strategic partner in modeling decisions and optimizing outcomes.
I’d like to hear your thoughts…where do you see financial analytics software heading given the convergence of planning, profitability and operational transfer pricing?