Read this article about IBM, one of our finalists, in the category Operational Excellence Project under 90 Days, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

On its journey to building the Premier Cognitive Enterprise, IBM launched the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) initiative. EPM is a framework for organizing, automating and analyzing business data, metrics, processes, and systems to optimize IBM’s overall performance.

Based on the EPM solution and within only six weeks, a global, cross functional team designed, developed, and released the IBM Financial Performance Dashboard to the Europe geography.

The dashboard is enabling finance teams to streamline the creation and consumption of key financial performance metrics and to accelerate evidence-based decision making across the IBM management system. It is changing the way we work and the way we run our business. Performance metrics are digitized, visualized, and put in the hands of the geography and market finance and business leaders for self-service and to take immediate business actions.

The key financial metrics in scope:

• Quarterly performance of signings, revenue, gross profit and pre-tax income by market and business unit.
• Comparison of performance year to year and versus budget.
• Drill down capabilities to sub-business units, month, country, client and revenue types.
• 3 years revenue trend by business unit, market and quarter.
  

IBM Financial Performance Dashboard is based on IBM Cognos Analytics and is integrated with a cloud-based file sharing solution, enabling a secure automatic dashboard creation and distribution. It is mobile enabled, compatible with all operating systems and accessible offline. The solution has been developed and delivered iteratively, applying Agile best practices and principles. A small, self-directed team collaborated and co-created the dashboard, delivering value quickly and continuously enhancing the solution based on the needs and feedback of the stakeholders.

The dashboard saves the Europe Finance team 1,200h of manual work to create and distribute spreadsheets and charts. The team can now focus on analysis, providing insights and supporting the business to make better and faster decisions. With the deployment of the dashboard to the other geographies we target to reduce the manual work of finance teams by 10,000 hours in 2019.  

 “The dashboard is changing the way we work […] it’s enabling self-service reporting. A great example of progression […]”

- Europe CFO

“An amazing dashboard with all information flow made so simple.”

- Financial Analyst, Middle East and Africa geography.

It would not be even possible to measure the value that Business and Finance leaders gain by having key financial metrics available to them anytime they need it. In addition, having that insight in a visualized way helps them direct their attention to areas that require focus and enables them to make even faster, evidence-based decisions, in support of IBM’s business objectives.