Software Satisfaction

Jon Kondo explains the importance of corporate performance management in ensuring an efficient business model.

“SaaS shifts the balance of power back to the customer”
-Jon Kondo

Why should companies consider corporate performance management?
Jon Kondo. In today’s turbulent economic environment it is critical for companies to remain agile in their financial performance management. Having faster and clearer transparency into their business along with the ability to quickly adjust their financial plans allows companies to better weather the current market conditions. Benchmarks are clear that corporate performance management solutions (CPM) help companies thrive in adverse conditions by better understanding the dynamics of their business and factoring in the potential market and economic threats. In these wild times companies who wait for situations to evolve never can get ahead of the market whereas companies who have robust CPM solutions in place can model and plan for unforeseen changes or events. A dynamic modeling and planning environment gives them the agility to both plan and even react quickly without being bogged down in Excel hell.

In a nutshell, today’s economic times require companies to be all things at once; accurate with their numbers, agile in their ability to change and aligned across to the organization. 

What are the components of corporate performance management?
JK. An integrated suite of corporate performance management solution includes statutory financial consolidation, robust budgeting and planning, revenue planning, financial reporting and scorecards (designed to encapsulate the strategic plan). The scorecards serve as a tool for strategic management which is the capstone of corporate performance management, but even if a company is not ready for a balanced scorecard, benchmarks are clear – companies that replace Excel as their budgeting and planning tool with a systemized approach to budgeting and planning perform better. Also, with revenue forecasting a company can better align their operational plans with their financial plans and a financial consolidation system frees up valuable resources from purely aggregating the numbers to actually understanding the numbers. 

What is Host doing to meet these challenges?
JK. Host Analytics allows enterprises to reap all the benefits of world-class corporate performance management without the cost or long time to value of traditional on premise solutions. Host delivers this using a software as a service (SaaS) methodology. This allows companies to see positive results quickly while allowing them to iterate multiple times to accommodate the changing business environment around them. 

Why should companies consider corporate performance management delivered using SaaS?
JK. SaaS implementations are designed to be implemented quickly, provide fast time to value, and can be implemented incrementally. Companies purchasing SaaS CPM don’t need to break the bank or be ready to implement across the organization immediately.  This allows them to get quick wins or pockets of success before they move to the layer or division.

From a purchase software perspective SaaS shifts the balance of power away from the software vendor and back to the customer. Because the customer is in essence paying for a service means that we the vendor have to ensure on-going success and satisfaction or risk having the customer go away. SaaS delivery also ensures continuous improvement to the product as we continually strive to improve our functionality and service through frequent upgrades. Because a customer doesn’t have to go through a long custom implementation we can get someone up and running in a fraction of the time it would take to do an on premise implementation.  In fact, the market demands this of us. 

How can Host Analytics’ SaaS based corporate performance management suite help healthcare companies?
JK. We see healthcare companies benefiting from SaaS CPM in five ways over and above the typical value proposition of CPM: managing reimbursement calculations from Medicare/ Medicaid/ private insurance and so on. We see many of these calculations being currently performed in Excel; Host’s robust modeling environment supports these calculations and the flexibility they require. The second way is through modeling future reimbursements via driver based rules as legislation changes and budgets get tighter; another by modeling the appropriate level of optional procedures (non-insurance reimbursable) to accommodate changes in economic conditions. The fourth is through optimizing operations via flexible ‘what if’ analysis and flexing a plan; and the final one is through linking the strategic plan to the operational plan.

Jon Kondo is CEO of Host Analytics. Previously, he was Group Vice President, North American Enterprise Performance Management at Oracle where he was responsible for all EPM revenue. At Hyperion Solutions, Jon was VP and General Manager of the Americas where he had full P&L responsibility for the entire Americas Field Organization with revenues in excess of $560 million and was deeply involved in Hyperion’s push into the BI space.