News

The Enterprise Performance Management Market (EPM) market is one of the fastest growing areas for technology spending.  But as the complexity and breadth of EPM solutions expand and the scope of projects grows larger it is becoming increasingly difficult to find individuals with the skill sets required to implement them. Today’s finance manager operating in the EPM space not only requires a broad range of technical and accounting competencies but also well honed process and project management skills. Increasingly, a multi-disciplinary and team based approach is required to satisfactorily implement theses system yet employers seems pre-occupied with specific package skills which are in short supply.  Against this backcloth of growing resource shortages, FSN asks whether this package based approach is realistic or whether it is time to change tack in the quest to fill the skills gap.

Most commentators agree that as the financial systems market has shifted from ‘best of breed’ financial systems to complete suites of applications, so too has the complexity of the solutions on offer.  Fuelled by increasingly tight reporting timescales, compliance and international accounting regulation, organisations have found that they can no longer satisfy the wide range of information needs from different stakeholders using stand alone applications that cannot share data. So the market for consolidation packages, budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting systems has coalesced and through a series of mergers and acquisitions leading suppliers, such as Oracle Hyperion, SAP, SAS, Cognos and Infor (formerly GEAC) have assembled a formidable range of performance management solutions capable of meeting a broad range of needs.

Some would argue that the skills base has not kept pace with the wider developments in the market. Before the advent of EPM concept, applications were much simpler. Best of breed solutions were implemented on a stand-alone basis and systems accountants could specialise in specific applications, such as Hyperion Enterprise, safe in the knowledge that they would rarely need to step outside of their comfort zone. But rapid advances in communications and web technology have expanded the scope and scale of these applications so that global deployments are relatively commonplace and, for example, new budgeting application projects involving significant process change and several hundred users are routine. In addition to these traditional applications there are stretching demands in the areas of score-carding, performance dashboards and activity based management. Now that life has become much more complex, implementation specialists are called upon to have a more comprehensive set of competencies and a much wider business perspective. 

According to John Adams, a director at Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, it is the complexity of the solutions on offer that is driving the demand for broader skill sets and larger implementation teams as it becomes increasingly apparent that even talented individuals are unlikely to possess the full range of skills required. Nowadays, implementing something as straightforward as a consolidation and reporting system requires an enlarged range of competencies.

Adamstold FSN, “It is important to have a deep understanding of processes and workflow since it is vital that process elements are designed to take advantage of the capabilities of the software. The scope of the projects is wider and therefore we are dealing with much larger data sets than in the past, some of which may be drawn from different data owners. So the design of the application is more involved and often takes projects into other functional areas such as marketing, strategy and planning.”

Adamsconcedes that it is not easy to find the appropriate skills, particularly in one person. “The skills required may be as diverse as reporting skills, the design and build of web-forms, or hands-on experience of handling ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools to manage the manipulation of data,” he added.  As a result, Adams says that even modest implementation projects require teams of three or four people and, because of the number of interfaces and project dependencies that need to be managed, there is a far greater call for project management skills as well.

Ken Wareham, Group Financial System Manager at Old Mutual plc has also been at the sharp end of financial systems implementation for many years, working on ERP and performance management applications. He observes that working in a lean and efficient group function means that his small team has to be increasingly self-reliant from a skills point of view. “As a head office function we do not have the support of a large in-house IT organisation that one might find in divisions and so it is challenging to assemble a team with all of the skills we need. These could vary from SQL database skills to systems administration and structured business analysis as well as all of the knowledge of accounting and group journals,” he told FSN.

Although cross-training between packages is feasible Wareham cautions that it is the knowledge of particular package features that is important when a project is under pressure. “It’s the package nuances that are important. Although the principles of all consolidation packages are similar, it is the nuances or things that you won’t learn on a training course that catch you out,” he added.

Adamsalso considers that cross training is a realistic possibility but he believes its success largely depends on how current peoples’ skills are. “Many of the current versions of software have only been available for a few years so there isn’t a huge resource pool of experienced candidates. But in order for skills to be transferable from one system to another it is important that candidates have had exposure to the latest technology because the look and feel is very different from earlier generations of software,” he said.

So far, Old Mutual’s Wareham has not had to worry too much about finding resources. He told FSN, “In the past, I’ve always used SystemsAccountants a specialist in the EPM field who have a vast database of candidates. I’ve worked with them for seven years and they always seem to find the right sort of people.”

James Bradshaw, Managing Director of SystemsAccountants told FSN, “Although the EPM market is very buoyant, the extended scope of projects also means that individual candidates are being stretched and it is increasingly unrealistic to expect any individual to possess all of the skill sets required. All of this means that employers may need to look more creatively at teambuilding to fulfil a range of different project roles and cross training to acquire specific package skills.”

If the EPM market continues to grow as expected, then it will be some time before there are ample skills in the market, after all, software suppliers, consultancies and companies are all competing for the same resources. In the meantime, employers will need to take a flexible approach to staffing whist fiercely protecting the limited resources they have at their disposal.