Cost and Profitability Manager

Background

The profitability of large complex organisations can be undermined by the disproportionate consumption of scarce resource by:

• Processes and activities
• Products and services
• Channels and partners
• Territories and customers

Poor performance under any, or all, of these headings can be disguised by nominal allocations of cost and human resource. Thus, profit is compromised and failing components persist.

CPM is a reliable tool by which to identify such failing components within any business, as a first step toward the development of effective remedies.

The product is supported by skilled practitioners in this specialist field, and can be deployed as required in the modern technical environment.

 

The Product

Cost and Profitability Manager (CPM) is a web based application that provides all the required functionality to produce an Activity Based Cost Model.

Written in the Microsoft Silverlight™ technology, CPM has a rich user interface more normally associated with client- server applications.  It can be hosted within your in-house infrastructure or deployed onto the "cloud".

CPM is dimension or hierarchy based with a natural progression of data from the General Ledger to Resource Dimensions, then to Activity Dimensions and finally to the Cost Object Dimensions.

The system can hold an unlimited number of "models" or projects that share these dimensions and provide different scenarios based on diverse source data or dissimilar assignment patterns.

A full range of assignment options are provided for :-

• General Ledger to Resource Assignments
• Resource to Activity Assignments
• Activity to Activity Assignments
• Activity to Cost Object Assignments
• Cost Object to Cost Object Assignments

 

The Results

The Output from each of the models created is downloaded to a Microsoft SQL Server Database allowing for full analysis and reporting using Microsoft Office Tools, software which should be familiar to all.

These tools include :-

Excel - From within Excel it is possible to access the CPM OLAP cube and perform detailed analysis of various cost and profit scenarios.

Powerpivot - Powerpivot provides the "data in memory" fast access to analyse, sort and filter great amounts of source data from the various models.

SharePoint - For dissemination of dashboard style information across the business, SharePoint can be used to create interactive dashboards and score cards.

This enriched reporting layer allows for powerful and deep analysis of the costs which are driving your business profitability, starting with high level summarised views yet allowing drill down to the lowest level of data.