We spent a couple of days on board with our friends
relaxing in total luxury, being pampered by the crew who did a superb job in
making us feel very, very special. A big
thank you J & K. One of my
everlasting memories will be the expectant look on the faces of tourists on the
dock as we backed into port, trying to work out if we were famous movie stars
or rock gods and then walking on by when they realised I was just normal fat
bloke with a nice red British lobster tan
:)
On the way home, I was browsing on the web and looking at
the price of chartering yachts and I found a lovely boat called "Va
Bene", which is owned by a hero of
mine: Eric Clapton. Checking the price
for a week in August - £200,000 for 7 days !!!!!!
Sadly, the first thought in my mind was "I could
implement a decent EPM project for less than that!"
So it got me thinking, what is more value for money? Would I want to spend a week on Slowhand's
lovely boat or implement a world class planning or reporting solution.....
The thought process to justify either is fairly similar.
You see, if you ever thought about owning a yacht and
cruising the med, you'd never do it.
Aside from the initial cost, they constantly need maintenance and the
running costs are horrendous.
Financially, owning a yacht doesn't make sense but for
the time you are on board the yachts, you feel like you're on top of the
world. The special feeling you get
cannot be measured in value, it's priceless.
If you can afford it, just do it...........
Similarly, the business cases for EPM projects are also
difficult to justify if you look purely on financials.
Some companies try to justify on headcount savings but
realistically the heads that get saved in 'Excel churning' should be used
elsewhere more productively in analyzing the results rather than producing
them.
I have seen some business cases trying estimate savings
around reducing the risk made from errors in spreadsheets and even percentages
of profit improvement driven by better decision making......REALLY! The irony here is that these business cases
have come from the finance department who should know better.
There is no question that in the mid to large modern
finance function; you cannot support the business with just Excel as your
tool. It's pointless to make up numbers
so why bother.
Conclusion!
If you're a reasonable mature finance divisional head who
is frustrated at the amount of time it takes to plan or report, are nervous about
the quality of numbers produced by your team by their 1,000
spreadsheets...........buy an EPM solution.
Alternatively, if you’ve already made your millions and
fancy cruising around the med ..........buy a yacht!
