INSIGHT
If you lead a FP&A team, you’ve probably experienced the tension between what the business needs from your team and the amount of effort required to support those requests. Leadership wants updated forecasts, visibility into performance, and answers to new questions as they arise. Meanwhile, your team is juggling spreadsheets, reconciling data from multiple systems, and working through planning processes that have been modified over the years to accommodate growth, new reporting requirements, and changing priorities.
Arbi Villena encounters this often in her EPM consulting work. “A lot of FP&A teams know exactly where the friction is. They’re dealing with it every month. The challenge is they feel like they don’t have time to fix it while also supporting the business.”
EPM consulting helps organizations improve the planning, forecasting, reporting, and data processes that support FP&A. Whether the need involves forecasting models, reporting frameworks, data integration, technology implementation, or planning process improvements, the objective is to help your team spend less time maintaining the process and more time helping the business make decisions.
Why FP&A Teams Feel the Strain First
If you’re responsible for forecasting and planning, you’re often one of the first people to recognize when existing processes are becoming difficult to sustain. Budgets still get built, forecasts still get updated, and reports still reach leadership, but the amount of coordination required behind the scenes can start increasing. For example, a forecast update may require input from multiple departments before anyone can begin evaluating the results.
In other situations, reporting may depend on information spread across several systems, creating additional reconciliation work before the numbers can be trusted. New requests from leadership can create similar pressure when scenario analysis is needed on a timeline the current process struggles to support. Those challenges often prompt organizations to evaluate whether the systems, models, and processes supporting FP&A are still aligned with the needs of the business.
What Is EPM Consulting?
EPM consulting focuses on helping organizations create a stronger planning and reporting environment. Depending on your team’s needs, an engagement may include evaluating planning processes, designing forecasting models, improving reporting structures, integrating data sources, implementing EPM technology, or supporting the organization after deployment. The work usually begins by examining questions such as:
- Where is your team spending the most time?
- How quickly can forecasts be updated?
- Which reports are driving decisions?
- Where do delays occur?
- Which processes create the most frustration for finance and business users?
The answers help identify opportunities to improve how planning and reporting happen across the organization. Rather than looking at technology in isolation, EPM consulting examines the people, processes, data, and systems contributing to forecasting and reporting outcomes.
How EPM Consulting Supports FP&A Teams
Most FP&A teams have access to plenty of data. Turning that information into reliable forecasts, useful reports, and planning insights quickly enough to support decisions is often where the challenge begins. If your team spends days consolidating information before a forecast can be reviewed, EPM consulting can help address the underlying causes. In some organizations, that work centers on forecasting models and reporting structures. In others, the priority may be improving data flows, reducing manual processes, or implementing technology that gives finance a more consistent planning environment. Organizations often see improvements such as:
- Shorter budgeting and forecasting cycles
- More consistent reporting across departments
- Faster scenario modeling
- Better visibility into financial performance
- Stronger alignment between forecasts and business outcomes
- More capacity for analysis, planning, and recommendations
When planning processes become easier to manage and information is easier to access, finance teams can devote more attention to analysis and decision support instead of preparing data for review. For one customer, refreshing actuals went from hours to minutes, so they can pull them multiple times a day to catch last-minute adjustments during close. Calculations recalculate on refresh, every module updates together, and drill-through lets people trace a number back to its source. They also have more flexibility to spin up different versions, with an audit trail on every change. Their team spends the close reviewing results instead of assembling them.
Signs Your FP&A Team Has Outgrown Its Current Planning Process
If your planning process feels heavier than it did a few years ago, you are probably not imagining it. As the business grows, finance teams are often asked to support more forecasting cycles, more reporting requests, and more planning discussions without a corresponding change in the processes or systems behind that work.
For example, a forecast update that used to be straightforward may now require input from multiple departments before your team can begin analyzing the results. In other cases, reporting may involve reconciling information across several systems before leadership can review the numbers. Scenario planning can create similar pressure when new requests arrive faster than the team can prepare reliable information. Any one of these issues may be manageable, but together they can consume time that would be better spent analyzing results, evaluating assumptions, and supporting decisions. Common indicators include:
- Budgeting cycles that take longer than expected
- Forecast updates that require significant manual effort
- Heavy reliance on spreadsheets for planning and reporting
- Inconsistent reporting across departments
- Difficulty performing scenario analysis quickly
- Limited visibility into current performance
- Multiple systems contributing data to planning processes
When several of these challenges are present, it may be time to evaluate whether the planning environment still fits the way your business operates.
What an EPM Consulting Engagement Typically Includes
A strong EPM consulting engagement should meet your finance team where it is. Some organizations need help defining requirements before selecting technology. Others already have an EPM platform but need better models, cleaner integrations, improved reporting, or support after deployment.
Business System Assessment
Many engagements begin by evaluating current systems, planning processes, reporting requirements, and future goals. This creates a clearer view of what is working, where friction exists, and which capabilities your team may need next.
Financial Model Design
Planning models, forecasting frameworks, and reporting structures should reflect how your finance organization operates and how leadership uses information. Model design helps translate planning needs into a structure that can support recurring cycles and changing assumptions.
Data & Integration Support
Budgeting and forecasting become more effective when data flows reliably between systems. Integration support helps reduce manual consolidation and creates a stronger foundation for reporting, analysis, and planning decisions.
Post-Go-Live Support
The work often continues after implementation. Post-go-live support may include forecasting assistance, scenario planning, reporting enhancements, process refinement, and support during month-end, quarter-end, or year-end planning activities.
Building an FP&A Function That Can Scale
As the leader of an FP&A team, you’re expected to support planning discussions, explain performance, evaluate possible outcomes, and help leadership make informed decisions. Those responsibilities become easier to manage when planning models, reporting structures, data sources, and supporting systems work together instead of creating additional administrative effort.
“The best EPM projects start with the questions finance is trying to answer every week. Once those questions are clear, it’s much easier to build a planning process that supports them.” – Arbi Villena
EPM consulting helps strengthen the foundation behind budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and scenario planning. If forecasting, reporting, and planning cycles are consuming more of your team’s capacity than they should, it may be worth evaluating whether your current planning environment can support the next stage of growth. Contact us today to explore EPM consulting services.
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