Analyst Perspectives

While headlines tend to focus on flashier topics, arguably the biggest business impact from technology advances over the past two decades has been on helping midsize enterprises improve their performance. These organizations have the same requirements as larger ones but have fewer resources to address those needs. Prophix has been at the forefront of using technology innovation to close that gap throughout this period. Its latest advances include Prophix One, introduced last year, and FP&A Plus, the latest evolution of their financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform. We gave Prophix One our Digital Innovation Award for the Office of Finance in 2024.  

Prophix One is a finance and accounting platform that provides enterprises a single point of entry and common authentication for financial applications. It uses in-memory cube technology to enable enterprises to handle complex planning tasks built on very large datasets to eliminate barriers to support integrated business planning. The platform and its dedicated data store support the use of artificial intelligence (AI) using machine learning to compress planning cycles with better forward intelligence and high participation planning. A major benefit of using planning software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), as Prophix does, is that it allows enterprises to operate at scale elastically with the needs of the business, providing midsize enterprises with a superior performance-cost experience. The platform also makes it possible for customers to start with any application and expand as their needs evolve while maintaining a common user experience and full data integration. 

FP&A Plus is the company’s latest version of its business planning software. Prophix was early in addressing the need for enterprises to bring together their operational and financial planning across their entire organization. This integration creates a comprehensive business management tool that supports better decision-making, improves organizational and individual business unit performance while respecting financial constraints and objectives. This approach to business planning provides executives and managers with a robust tool that enables them to manage more effectively to improve performance and agility. This method of business planning is infeasible using stand-alone spreadsheets because of their inherent technical limitations. ISG Research rated Prophix as Assurance in the Business Planning Buyers Guide where these improvements help address areas of its products for improvement. 

Despite the business benefits that enterprises can achieve from business-focused planning, our research finds that more than half of enterprises rely on spreadsheets to manage their planning and budgeting processes. I believe one reason is that despite the limitations of stand-alone spreadsheets, many potential buyers have not found the benefits of a dedicated application to be overwhelmingly better. That’s about to change and FP&A Plus shows why.  

FP&A Plus is engineered to take full advantage of a web-based planning platform. For Prophix customers, its Infinix engine running on AWS scales and performs to the needs of the customer, regardless of the scope or complexity of the enterprise or the business planning models. For example, rapid iterations of detailed stock-keeping unit (SKU) level forecasts and their impact on operations and finance are feasible. Staffing-heavy businesses can quickly gauge the effects of a range of wage and benefit scenarios by worker types and locations. The potential impact of tariffs or other forces affecting input costs can be modeled, along with the results of management responses to those changes. The software takes advantage of techniques developed over the past decade to optimize performance and cost, including containerized elastic resource scaling, column stores for rapid data retrieval and bitmap indexing to streamline search and filtering.  

An important feature of the Prophix platform that makes high-performance business relevance possible is its unified data store. Unlike a general-purpose construct such as a data warehouse, everything that users of FP&A Plus need is readily available and easily accessible, with labels that are immediately recognized and understood. Connectors automatically pull information from all necessary source systems (such as ERP and CRM) into the platform, transforming it to create a usable unitary source. This addresses a major barrier faced by FP&A professionals. They often have less time to do forward-looking analysis because the mechanical process of pulling together and collating data takes up so much time that little remains for using data to spot trends, find opportunities and isolate issues to create better-informed forecasts, plans and decisions. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research found that two-thirds of analysts spend considerable time on data preparation and reviewing data for quality and consistency issues, leaving less time for analysis. By substantially eliminating the time required for data preparation and data quality control, financial and business analysts have more time to concentrate on analytical work. Having consistent, reliable data resident on the platform makes automating updates and self-service reporting possible. FP&A Plus has a feature that automates commentary generation for tables. Professionals can have the system write the basic text and then edit it with additional insights or recommendations.   

By automating the collection of data, reports and dashboards can be timelier. By broadening the set and scope of data readily available with more information on which to base analyses, including external data, the FP&A group can provide more incisive perspectives and insights, enabling executives and managers to make better-informed decisions sooner. Having a planning platform that facilitates scenario planning is likely to provide a competitive advantage. ISG Software Research asserts that by 2028, only 20% of enterprises will have all the data they need to understand trade-offs in their scenario planning to improve agility, up from 12% today. The Infinix platform uses in-memory processing to speed calculations and data compression to allow faster processing and reduced storage requirements, which cuts costs without affecting data integrity. It applies directed acyclic graphics routines to streamline calculations and data flows, which cut models’ processing time and scalability.  

To handle the most common aspects of an integrated business plan, the software facilitates collecting and incorporating sales forecasts and workforce plans so that updates to price lists, benefit costs, projected headcount levels and the like are instantly reflected in projected income statements, proforma balance sheets and statements of cash flows, whether these are monthly, quarterly or annual. Multiple scenarios driven by key performance metrics or other macro assumptions can be created on the fly and compared side by side. Moreover, having the operational and financial data at hand makes it possible to do product- or channel-level profitability analysis to make informed decisions around pricing strategies. This enables enterprises to adopt a profitability management discipline, a more effective approach to widening margins compared to having profitability objectives.  

One issue that FP&A professionals confront in bringing together financial and operational plans is orchestrating the process to support rapid reforecasting cycles. Prophix has an easy-to-configure workflow manager to enable time-challenged administrators to manage by exception, letting the system handle routine matters. 

I’ve written extensively about the potential for AI and generative AI (GenAI) to have a significant positive impact on finance department productivity. There’s almost no end to the ways technology can enhance departmental productivity. This goes beyond simple efficiency gains to include important contributors to extending the capabilities of the staff to improve the performance of the entire enterprise. The feasible and cost-efficient use cases that AI and GenAI can bring to finance organizations over the next five years by software providers will depend heavily on their foundational technology. Prophix One and FP&A Plus are designed to support these advances. I strongly recommend that enterprises that manage their forecasting, planning, budgeting and reporting using stand-alone spreadsheets shift to a cloud-based planning platform. Those that are currently using an on-premises dedicated application also should consider moving to the cloud. In either case, I recommend that they evaluate Prophix for this purpose as well as its other financial management capabilities. 

Regards,

Robert Kugel