Prophix Innovation Showcase 2018

The modern finance function is increasingly called upon to provide predictive and proactive insight. But without collaborative business partnering and a cohesive technology platform to support it, finance and FP&A professionals will be stuck looking backwards instead of realizing their full potential as strategic business partners.

Many organizations have invested large sums of money in infrastructure, yet despite very rich operational systems, they are frequently fragmented and used by each department independently. The big challenge for finance is how to bring an organization’s disparate systems together to collate the data that will build up a comprehensive picture of corporate health and strategic direction. Organizations may have marketing automation tools, sales automation tools, ERP and CRM systems, and business intelligence tools, but very often these do not communicate with each other. The key to business partnering is to weave all this together to tell a story of where the business is heading.

Historically, mid-sized companies and rapidly growing businesses have been at a significant disadvantage. They find themselves mired in spreadsheets and disparate operational systems without access to affordable Corporate Performance Management (CPM) systems that are sympathetic to the needs of the mid-market. Traditional CPM suites tend to be large, unwieldy and poorly integrated and frequently require the support of specialist IT and dedicated application resources that are beyond the reach of smaller enterprises.

Prophix’s crowning innovation was to bring CPM to the mid-market, making it accessible and affordable. And that tradition of innovation in the mid-market has continued to evolve. In this showcase we highlight just three areas, namely, how Prophix extends the reach of CPM beyond the finance function; how it uses natural language processing, AI and Machine Learning to ‘humanize’ the user experience and, finally, its approach to enabling successful finance transformation.