CPM & BI Tools: Which is Better for Your Business? Part 1

If you are looking at new ways to analyze your business, it most likely means your current reporting tools are not getting the job done. With so many options to choose from, let us narrow it down to BI and CPM to determine which is right for your organization.

What is the difference between CPM and BI?

Both pull data from various data sources to analyze information so you can prioritize market opportunities, company strengths, and weaknesses. BI platforms gather and analyze data relevant to the organizations business in order to improve business decision making. CPM tracks and manages your company’s KPI’s such as operational costs, revenues, budgets, overhead, and additional financial metrics. Both definitions overlap but there are differences.

CPM tools typically focus on budgeting & planning, forecasting with visual and graphical dashboards to track the KPI’s relative to company objectives and goals. BI focuses more on visual data such as dashboards, graphs, scorecards, for big data analysis such as website traffic and customer buying behavior.

Who are the end users for CPM and BI?

CPM

Typically, the end users for CPM reside within the finance department as they lead the charge for planning reporting, adjusting, and analyzing the business data. You can break CPM’s use within finance to five main areas:

• Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting
• Financial Consolidation
• Strategy Management
• Financial Modeling
• Financial, Management Reporting

BI

BI users range from everyone from behind the scenes ETL developers (Extract, Transform, and Load) to business users across all departments (sales, marketing, operations, etc). Traditionally, people generally agree that analysts (those who want to analyze and manipulate large samples of data) were the ideal end users for BI tools, but that is changing quickly as most platform in the SMB space have created drag & drop interfaces to allow users to pull their own data displayed with charts and graphs. Think of BI as analysis across the entire organization and CPM spearheaded by finance. At the end of the day we can agree that all organizations, executives, and end user want to achieve the following:

• Improve decision-making process
• Make it easier to share information across your entire organization
• Help you understand what your business does really well, and where the bottlenecks exist.

Now that we’ve gone over what BI and CPM are, be sure to keep an eye out for part two of my blog where we will discuss whether or not BI and CPM will be a good fit for your company.

If you have any further questions in the meantime, please feel free to contact us by submitting the form below. We’d love to hear from you!