Where’s the Innovation in Corporate Performance Management (CPM)? – An Introduction to the Blog Series

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, organizations need the agility to adapt and change to keep up with the growing demands of managing corporate performance. Modern CFOs and finance teams need a solution and capabilities to more effectively track financial and operational performance and metrics. Why? That’s the only way to maintain alignment and measure effectiveness between strategy and execution.

For over three decades, CFOs and finance teams have relied on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) or Corporate Performance Management (CPM) as the backbone to manage business performance. For what? To execute core processes like financial close and consolidations for actuals. Financial and operational planning for budgets and forecasts. And statutory and management reporting and analysis for financial and operational insights to stakeholders across the business.

Having been in this industry for my whole career, I’ve seen firsthand how many organizations continue to struggle with CPM systems. Frankly, some of these systems haven’t evolved much, nor in the right ways, in the last few decades. The same legacy story plays out repeatedly: separate, disconnected applications for financial close and consolidation, financial and operational planning, reporting, and analysis. Each of these applications has unique data structures, requiring complex integrations, reconciliations, and workarounds to ensure consistency. Why are we still approaching CPM like it’s 1994?

To manage corporate performance today, CFOs and finance teams are stewards of corporate performance. Therefore, they must link the core processes of CPM and extend further for financial and operational planning and provide more granular, fresh agile financial analytics to stakeholders across the organization. For the remainder of this series, I’ll be using CPM instead of EPM to refer to performance management.

In this blog series, I’ll take you through a deep dive into the evolution—or lack thereof—of CPM and why so many businesses still rely on outdated approaches, processes, and fragmented systems. Together, we'll explore the following:

1. What challenges companies face today
2. How modern approaches and technologies like OneStream’s uniquely unified platform are reshaping the CPM landscape
3. How innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are setting the stage for a new era of performance management

This first post will set the stage for our journey, offering an overview of what’s to come in the next three blogs. In the post, I’ll cover a brief history of CPM, modern organizational challenges, and the technology driving the innovations shaping corporate performance.

Why Traditional CPM Falls Short

As a core function for every business, CPM helps manage financial close and consolidation, financial and operational planning and forecasting, reporting, and analytics. But here’s the catch: many of the tools and systems in place or offered by many top CPM vendors as modern approaches have the same problem. They’re still using approaches that were designed decades ago when technology and businesses were vastly different than today.

These legacy solutions were built at a time when data silos were acceptable and system-wide alliances in financial and operational performance didn’t really exist. Why? It simply wasn’t considered essential or deemed technically feasible.

Even now, organizations are using separate applications to manage different facets of CPM. This disjointed approach brings numerous challenges:

1. Integrating data from different systems takes significant time, effort, and cost, leading to inefficiencies.
2. Managing these integrations creates technical debt as teams must maintain fragile connections between systems and deal with constant reconciliation between them.
3. Using this approach makes it difficult to get a single, reliable version of the truth—something every CFO needs to make informed decisions.

Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been conditioned to accept this inefficiency? It does to me. Many of the tools and systems offered as modern CPM systems also use the same approach that’s been relied on for decades. And that’s the problem because the systems are still fundamentally fragmented, requiring organizations to do the heavy lifting of integration.

Worse, the problem is exacerbated by vendors who find it easier to lift-and-shift old solutions and approaches. Such vendors instead still sell piecemeal solutions rather than rethinking CPM from the ground up.

The 30-Year Quest for a “Real” Single Source of Truth

One of the holy grails of CPM has always been the elusive “single source of truth.” Endlessly, organizations have chased this ideal—a unified view of financial and operational performance that allows leaders to make data-driven decisions with confidence. But this has been incredibly difficult to achieve with traditional tools, and for good reason.

Fragmented systems lead to data inconsistencies, complex reconciliations, and poor data governance. Since each system manages its own piece of the puzzle, no overarching framework aligns the systems. The result is a patchwork of solutions that never quite delivers what’s promised, despite significant investments in time, money, and effort.

But here’s the thing: technology has evolved. So why hasn’t CPM?

Uniquely Unified Platforms Can Solve These Challenges

Rather than forcing organizations to juggle separate tools for different functions, OneStream’s approach has remained the same from the beginning. To provide a uniquely unified, cloud-based platform that integrates financial close, consolidation, financial and operational planning, reporting, and analysis. What does that mean for organizations? No more complex, time-consuming integrations. No more reconciliation challenges. OneStream gives organizations what they’ve wanted for decades: a single, unified platform that provides a consistent, reliable view of financial and operational data.

What makes OneStream different? It was designed by finance experts, from the ground up, to solve the fundamental issues that have plagued CPM for years. Having a unified platform and built-in financial intelligence with unique innovations like Extensible Dimensionality, OneStream allows data with different alignment to co-exist and automatically reconcile. Companies can thus align all financial and operational data and processes.

From consolidation and close to financial and operational planning to reporting and analysis, OneStream brings together all functions, ending the need for separate systems for each. The result is fewer moving parts, less complexity, fewer opportunities for data misalignment, and faster time to value, both functionally and technically. Plus, OneStream’s built for continuous innovation. That will especially matter as new technologies like AI, ML, and agile financial analytics become more integrated into business processes.

OneStream’s platform is based on the premise that the vendor should do the hard work of integrating all data and processes not the organization. That gives organizations the time and flexibility to evolve as their businesses and markets evolve. With built-in analytics and a modern, cloud-based infrastructure, OneStream eliminates technical debt, allowing organizations to focus on strategic initiatives rather than maintaining outdated systems and approaches.

The Journey Ahead in This Blog Series

In this blog series, we’ll be exploring CPM in more depth in three additional posts.

Blog 2: The History of CPM and the Quest for a Single Source of Truth

In Blog 2, we’ll take a step back to define what exactly CPM is and why the current approach is broken by doing the following:

1. Outlining the critical processes involved, such as consolidation, planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis.
2. Covering the history of CPM.
3. Exploring the 30-year quest for a single source of truth.
4. Examining why the market has been conditioned to accept fragmented solutions.

The ultimate goal of the post will be to better understand how the challenges in managing performance don’t really get solved with this approach. Rather than offering a solution, these systems create inefficiencies, lack of integration capabilities, and data inconsistencies. As a result, many organizations remain burdened by complex, inflexible systems riddled with technical debt. These systems cannot handle the scale and complexity of modern businesses, often requiring substantial effort to integrate disparate data/metadata and manage processes across systems.

Blog 3: Modern Approaches to CPM

As we move into the present day, organizations are starting to see that modern approaches to CPM offer a way to escape this cycle of inefficiency. In Blog 3, we’ll explore these modern approaches to CPM and why the time is ripe for change — focusing on cloud-based, unified platforms that bring multidimensional and relational data together.

We’ll explore the benefits of a unified platform, including efficiency, effectiveness, total cost of ownership (TCO), and the elimination of technical debt. In doing so, we’ll detail why these solutions provide the foundation for seamless integration of processes and data. But we’ll also demonstrate why they finally provide a “single source of truth” — with real-time insights that drive better decision-making.

Blog 4: Innovations in CPM

The future of CPM is exciting with innovations, from AI and ML to dynamic data services. In Blog 4, we’ll dive into the innovations poised to advance the CPM landscape and explore how OneStream is setting the stage for the following continual innovations in CPM, among others:

• A MarketPlace of solutions offered by OneStream, our partners, and our customer ecosystem, providing production-ready solutions that can be downloaded and deployed without adding more solutions and technical debt.
• Finance-focused Sensible AI focused on and applied to all data and processes with transparency and trust, ensuring finance understands all the attributes and can trust the insights and context.
• Dynamic Cube Services that empower finance to bring together any internal or external data (without loading data) to dynamically feel like a cube alongside financially intelligent hierarchies, providing a uniquely unified analytic model that adapts automatically as data evolves to deliver insights at the speed of the business.
• Genesis and CPM Express with no-code frameworks and specialized capabilities for rapid deployment, making it easier for businesses of any size to transition to modern CPM systems without lengthy implementation times or the complexity of adapting to new processes and solutions.

These innovations are enabling the shift toward continuous processes where organizations no longer rely solely on static, periodic reporting but can track and manage performance on an ongoing basis.

Finally, we’ll consider an important question: Where do we go from here? As CPM platforms continue to evolve, we’re moving toward a future where performance management becomes not just a process but a core strategic enabler. The ability to integrate AI, dynamic data, and predictive analytics will redefine how organizations measure success and adapt to changing business and market conditions.

Enabling the Future with Innovative CPM

The time has come to move beyond the fragmented, outdated approaches of the past. Instead, now is the time to invest in solutions that will provide greater efficiency today and evolve—both with us and with the technologies of the future. Join me on this journey as we explore the history, challenges, modern solutions, and innovations shaping the future of CPM.

Ready to learn more? Check out our website and customer successes. And stay tuned for the next blog to get a deeper look at the history of CPM and the challenges that have shaped the market.