When Beth Perlman became the CIO of Constellation Energy almost five years ago, the energy giant's financial systems were sprawling and disorganized. Her focus on updating and consolidating the company's business performance management (BPM) software has resulted in much more efficient budgeting and management reporting processes.

BPM Magazine:What was the landscape of financial software at Constellation Energy when you arrived?

Beth Perlman:When I first came in, we had 13 financial systems. The company was very siloed -- I'm the first corporate CIO. Each major business unit did its own thing. We didn't have a standard chart of accounts; we didn't have standard rollups. We had different levels of granularity in different business units, and we were budgeting at a different level than how we actually kept data in the general ledger. People had expanded their financial systems to include so much information that it was really hard to consolidate for our monthly reporting package and our quarterly analyst calls. In addition, everything was done through Excel, which meant we were using mostly manual processes and spending valuable time rechecking our work.

BPM:How did you go about making your performance management processes more efficient?

Perlman:We planned to implement a new financial system and consolidate everybody onto one system. But before we could do that -- because that was no easy feat -- we said, "Let's try at least to get the budgeting process under control." We used OutlookSoft as the tool. It originally gathered data from 13 different systems and helped with the analysis, although there was some additional input that was required.

But we started keeping only the financial data in the general ledger; the financial systems are now just financial. Everything else, operational data plus the financial data, is kept in OutlookSoft. Each business unit has adopted OutlookSoft, and they do much more enhanced reporting relating to how they do their month-end financials and analysis.

BPM:That must help the consistency of companywide reporting too.

Perlman:Well, our business units are in very different businesses, so it's really hard to say that there's a consistent metric. But it has improved the granularity and the level of detail. You cannot mix financial reporting and management reporting in the same system. Before we pulled our operational data out of the general ledger, the management reporting wasn't good. So we focused our ERP system on financial reporting.

BPM:What's an example of operational data that you store in your BPM system now?

Perlman:One of our business units, the generation group, now tracks operational data relating to project costs and the performance of specific generating units. For example, it may track outage data. That has a cost related to it, but it's not necessarily translated directly to dollars and cents.

BPM:What benefits have you seen from separating out this type of data?

Perlman:We're getting much more sophisticated in what we do for analysis. Before, when all the information was in our general ledger, we ended up with too many general details and not the right granularity. We ended up with a very long reporting key and then it was hard for people to get reports out. Where I see OutlookSoft helping us is combining operational data and financial data and being able to perform analysis.

BPM:How have your top executives responded to the new management reporting capabilities?

Perlman:My boss, who's the CFO, is very funny. The more information she gets, the more information she wants. So it's not placating people; it's driving their hunger. And I don't see an end in sight.

BPM:Do you feel that it's improving business decisions throughout the company?

Perlman:It definitely is. It's giving people much more specific information -- so better information to make decisions on. What we're trying to get to now is to have more real-time dashboards on our portal, with the information coming from places like OutlookSoft. We want to get to a little more forecasting throughout the month and more real-time reporting.

BPM:What kinds of information do you see putting on the real-time dashboards?