By John O'Rourke April 4, 2023
The global economic disruptions and turmoil of recent years have made it challenging for many enterprises to make informed decisions about hiring and overall investment plans. In this context, the ongoing planning, monitoring and management of financial and operating results have become critical to the success of organizations across the globe. As a result, many enterprises are increasing their investments in technologies that can help streamline financial management processes and support more informed, agile decision-making.
It's with this backdrop that European market research firm BARC published their BARC Score report for Financial Performance Management (FPM) for 2023. Read on to learn about the latest market trends and why OneStream was recognized as a leader in the market for the 3rd year in a row.
FPM is About Looking Backward and Forward
While they call it financial performance management (FPM) and we call it corporate performance management (CPM), the analysts at BARC are spot on in recognizing the importance of having a performance management platform that looks back into the past ("what has happened") as well as helps enterprises plan and manage the future ("what will happen").
The 2023 BARC Score for FPM software evaluates vendors that provide integration of various financial processes in a common software platform – including planning, budgeting and forecasting, financial close and consolidation as well as reporting and analytics. Having these processes closely aligned is critical to effective decision-making and enabling high productivity for users in Finance and lines of business.
Some of the key market trends identified in the 2023 BARC Score FPM report include the following:
- An accelerated supply of information for decision-makers.
- Increasing consideration of internal and external data for decision-making.
- Greater use of data and analytics in decision-making and management processes.
- Short-term planning and forecasts with a higher updating frequency.
- Digitalization and greater software support for internal processes as an essential basis for their optimization and further automation.
According to BARC, support from modern and requirements-oriented software solutions is an essential element in achieving these goals. The BARC Score for FPM software analyzes the strengths and challenges of the leading FPM vendors in the market that should be considered by potential buyers.
Digging Into the BARC Score for FPM Software
Under the BARC Score methodology, every vendor is evaluated on two dimensions, Portfolio Capabilities and Market Execution. Each represents one axis on the BARC Score.
These two dimensions include the following sub-criteria:
- Portfolio Capabilities reflect functional and architectural criteria. A special emphasis is placed on ease of use for business users. Regarding the vendor ratings in this BARC Score, the focus is rather on the prebuilt business content and FPM solutions that the vendors provide and less on flexibility for individual applications that can be built with development environments.
This pre-built functionality is evaluated across Financial Planning, Financial Consolidation, Reporting, Analysis and Operational Planning and Forecasting.
- Market Execution rates the FPM vendors in this BARC Score on factors such as Product Strategy, Customer Satisfaction, Financials, Geographical Coverage, Ecosystem, Sales Strategy, Organizational Strength and Marketing Strategy.
Based on their scoring on these two dimensions, vendors are categorized into one of 5 regions: Dominators, Leaders, Challengers, Specialists and Entrants.
So the million-dollar question is – how was OneStream rated in the report?
OneStream is a Global Leader in FPM Software
For the 3rd year in a row, OneStream was recognized as a Leader in the BARC Score for FPM software report. In fact, our Leadership position improved slightly in the 2023 report, with OneStream now sharing the highest-rated Portfolio Capabilities and improving our rating on Market Execution. And it's important to note that OneStream is recognized as a leader in both the global (see figure 1) and DACH versions of this report.
Looking at the key strengths highlighted by BARC in the report, OneStream was recognized as a leader in FPM software based on the following:
- Integrated CPM platform for financial consolidation and close, planning, budgeting and forecasting, reporting and analytics with built-in financial intelligence and financial data quality capabilities, available in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- Integrated BI and analytics functionality for (print-oriented) production reporting, financial reporting (disclosure management) with self-service dashboards and visualizations, and ad hoc analysis via Microsoft Excel add-in.
- MarketPlace with more than 50 predefined business and productivity solutions.
- Excellent customer feedback in recent years for many important KPIs in BARC's 'The Planning Survey' including customer satisfaction with vendor and product, price-to-value and functionality for workflows. Many customers say they would recommend the platform to other organizations.
Learn More
Being recognized as a Leader in the BARC Score for FPM software is important as BARC performs a very thorough evaluation of software vendors and is very influential with Finance and IT buyers especially in the DACH region, and across EMEA in general.
To learn more, download a complimentary copy of the BARC Score for FPM solutions and contact OneStream if your organization is ready to take the leap from spreadsheets and point solutions to a comprehensive CPM software platform that can help you make confident decisions that maximize business impact.
