The "Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of a World-Class Financial Management System for Central Enterprises" issued by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council pointed out: "Establish intelligent, agile, systematic, in-depth, and forward-looking digital and intelligent finance." Combined with the needs of enterprise management transformation in the digital age , explore Promote the transformation of the financial operation mechanism from the pyramid model to the middle and back-end model, from process-driven to process-driven and data-driven, and strive to achieve flat management levels, fine-grained management, multi-dimensional management perspectives, dynamic management scenarios, Management information is real-time to ensure quick response and efficient operation.
UFIDA believes that the essence of budget management based on the aforementioned is to rely on data modeling to provide insight and analysis for business and management. In recent years, the EPM technology based on the new generation technology has made great breakthroughs in multi-dimensional modeling and memory computing. In terms of flexibility and performance, computing based on massive data has gradually surpassed overseas manufacturers such as Hyperion and BPC. Digital intelligence technology has been widely applied to the whole process of budget management. Agile, multi-dimensional, and efficient comprehensive budget management has become an indispensable tool for large enterprises, which will effectively make up for the shortcomings of large enterprises in the field of financial digital intelligence.
(1) Target formulation: Improve the accuracy of budget targets through multi-scenario simulation forecasting and intelligent forecasting
Multi-scenario and multi-version simulation calculation: The comprehensive budget system based on the multi-dimensional engine supports enterprises to conduct multi-scenario and multi-version simulation calculations, helping management to choose the most scientific version as the annual goal.
Intelligent prediction: use artificial intelligence and big data analysis technology to collect massive internal and external data of enterprises and establish relevant prediction models. Through training, reasoning, online, operation, repeated training and other processes, it can effectively improve the enterprise's strategy and goal setting capabilities in an uncertain environment.
(2) Approval of budget preparation: Improve the collaborative efficiency of budget preparation with the help of multi-dimensional engine and memory calculation
Rule engine visualization: Using multi-dimensional memory technology and a visualized rule engine, the budget modeling capability is greatly improved, making the budget management system more flexible and adaptable to dynamic management needs. For example, the calculation logic of the budget model does not need to be greatly changed for changes in the product line, organization or account of the enterprise.
In-memory computing technology: The emergence of in-memory computing technology has made budgeting more efficient. It enables data read speed up to 1 million times faster than disk-based data read speed, and efficient dynamic aggregation can quickly calculate and summarize data. Memory computing technology strengthens the ability of horizontal data reference and vertical data connection, which greatly improves the efficiency of budgeting.
Process engine and mobile approval: Using guided workflow, you can understand the budget preparation and approval status of each department of a large group enterprise in real time on one interface. Anytime, anywhere mobile approval speeds up the efficiency of the process.
(3) Budget control: more comprehensive and flexible budget control supported by the control center
Traditional budget control transfers budget data to various business systems (such as procurement, cost control, contract, project management, etc.), and develops control functions and sets control strategies in each business system. This method is not only cumbersome for finance, but also leads to frequent interaction between the budget system and the business system, seriously occupying system resources. The emergence of the budget control center solves these problems. It provides a one-stop, intuitive and flexible budget control policy configuration interface for finance. At the same time, it integrates with business systems through standard API interfaces, and establishes associations with various heterogeneous systems. With the support of the control rule engine, the budget control center realizes the intelligent control of the business system, effectively improving the flexibility and efficiency of budget control.
(4) Rolling forecast: Realize the possibility of real-time dynamic resource allocation with agile and intelligent forecasting
Realize T+N agile rolling through Forcast: Traditional budgets are often hard to keep up with changes in the market environment due to rigidity. The cumbersome budget addition and adjustment process seriously affected the development of the business. The new-generation agile comprehensive budget system not only has annual budget scenarios (Budget), but also can share business-driven annual budget models and build T+N forecast scenarios (Forcast). This scenario uses a rule engine to predict the situation in N periods (monthly, quarterly, etc.) based on the actual data at time T and combined with relevant future conditions. The business department only needs to complete the rolling adjustment of key drivers to quickly realize the linkage from business to financial forecast.
Multi-scenario intelligent prediction makes real-time dynamic resource allocation possible: the budget system application based on the large platform architecture naturally has the characteristics of integration with various business systems. The precipitation of full-scale and full-element data on the platform creates conditions for various businesses to reuse and share data, and to build a scenario-based modeling capability for different themes of the budget in a self-service manner. For example, sales forecast, price forecast, purchase forecast, capital forecast, tax forecast, investment project forecast, etc. Multi-scenario automatic prediction will greatly reduce the complexity and timeliness of prediction. The application of in-memory computing technology has greatly improved the computing performance of large amounts of data, thereby achieving the accuracy and timeliness of rolling forecasts, and supporting business decisions and resource allocation in real time.
(5) Budget adjustment: multi-scenario budget adjustment to improve budget adaptability
The new generation of agile comprehensive budget system can support various budget adjustments, transfers and additional scenarios, and can customize the approval process as needed. The budget adjustment, transfer and addition process of all units will be recorded in the system to meet the needs of retrospective analysis in the future. Here are some typical scenarios:
Overall budget adjustment initiated by the budget committee: used to make overall adjustments to the company's budget goals and budget process when the annual budget goal cannot be achieved, which may be caused by force majeure factors such as the external environment.
Budget transfer initiated by a newly established department (partial adjustment): When the budget target remains unchanged, due to organizational changes (such as new establishment, split, reorganization, etc.), it is necessary to adjust the budget among different departments.
Inter-department subject transfer initiated by the demand department: According to business needs, a department can apply for budget transfer between different subjects.
Extra-budgetary addition to the department in need: When the business unit completes the goals of income, profit, and repayment, it can apply for additional expense budget, etc.
(6) Budget Analysis: Realize data-driven management through multi-dimensional drill analysis and intelligent analysis
Root causes of budget variances can be clearly traced using multidimensional drill-through analysis techniques.
The breakthrough of multidimensional engine technology makes up for the lack of flexibility of the relational database budgeting system. For example, revenue difference analysis can be traced back to the responsible unit according to the organizational dimension, specific product models according to the product line, and in-depth analysis can also be conducted according to different dimensions such as channels, regions, and customers. In addition, budget analysis supports both dashboard-style visual analysis and analysis in a fixed table format. At the same time, it also supports flexible custom analysis through the Power Insight plug-in on the Excel interface, and can quickly build analysis reports through simple drag-and-drop methods according to the needs of management.
Intelligent decision-making and social collaboration help intelligent budget analysis and decision-making.
Driven by the development of the third platform technology (cloud computing, mobile, big data analysis, social networking), the early warning of budget analysis differences quickly forms a social collaboration and efficiently formulates solutions. All departments can quickly collaborate online to resolve budget variances, formulate improvement strategies and execution plans, and improve management efficiency. Driven by artificial intelligence technology, budgetary decisions and actions will also undergo qualitative changes. Analysis applications based on AI intelligence and algorithms can improve the perception and cognitive capabilities of machines through machine learning and knowledge graph technology, and realize intelligent data insight, decision-making and action, so as to realize intelligent analysis and decision-making driven by data.
(7) Budget assessment: Realize the assessment of the combination of budget work and performance through automatic reports
The budget work assessment can evaluate the timeliness of the budget by automatically capturing the budget submission time of each unit through the system. In addition, it can also automatically calculate the comprehensive deviation rate of each unit's budget and rolling forecast to assess the accuracy of the budget. The evaluation of budget performance indicators is to set key performance indicators and weights based on the responsibility positioning of each department and from the perspective of budget responsibility decomposition. The real-time integration of the budget system and the business system facilitates the transformation from "people looking for data" to "data looking for people" while meeting the needs of each responsible unit to view performance reports in real time.
In short, in order to speed up the construction of a world-class comprehensive budget management system, it is necessary to integrate "world-class benchmarking" with "digital intelligence technology", so as to achieve corporate goals more effectively .