Their financial liaison also understands what makes their line of business tick and can help point out areas of strength or, conversely, areas that need to be improved. In many cases, they've developed a very good partnership where they can honestly talk through the pros and the cons of their business unit and talk about how to mitigate the limitations of their group.

BPM: How have these tight relationships influenced your organization's performance?

King: Our annual budget process has two layers. The first includes the "business as usual" activities. The business units develop their forecasts based on assumptions that business will continue as usual.

The second layer involves budgeting for new initiatives and for areas where we're going to have dramatic changes to existing initiatives. This second layer is where I see the financial liaisons really adding value. They can look at what's going on currently and help the line-of-business manager put together some very good projections on how the new initiative will really affect the bottom line -- what impact it will have on the balance sheet and income statement for the corporation.

The financial liaisons can take the knowledge that they've already developed in terms of the day-to-day workings of that line of business and apply that knowledge to the new initiative. They can offer suggestions on questions like "What if we put additional salespeople on the initiative; how much more revenue could that bring?" Or "What if we scale back this piece? What does that do?"

BPM: Once the forecast is finalized and the month or quarter gets under way, how do you report on actuals against that budget?

King: We have reports that we have developed in Cartesis showing actuals versus budget, and also forecast versus budget. So when we've made some forecast changes, we can tell how that stacks up with the original budget. Various versions of those reports are available not only to our financial staff, but also to the top-line managers and middle managers within our lines of business. Depending on where a person is in the corporation, they may see two reports or they may see 10 reports.

BPM: How do end users access the reports?

King: The reports are out there, and as soon as our scripts are done running, we have immediate access online. It's basically one report that we can then drill into in various different ways. So we could start at the corporate level and drill down to the specific lines of business, and then if there's one in particular we want to look at, drill to a specific market. Or we could go from a high-level summary product view down to a specific product. That is all completely interchangeable; you can mix the two. You can look at a specific product with a specific unit.

BPM: How frequently do you run the scripts to update the reporting data?

Lorenz: Every day for actuals. Once we rolled out the product, the users liked the online drilldown capability, so now we're loading our actuals in every day. When everyone comes in in the morning, their reports are ready. So there's no wait time. We're not pushing information out to them; they go in through either the Excel add-in or through the Web tool to view their report.

BPM: How has the increased availability of this information benefited the company overall?

King: With the old process and software tool we used for budgeting, we had very limited ad hoc reporting capabilities and really no drilldown. So if we wanted to see the corporation from five different views, that meant we had to create five different reports. Whenever we would run the budget process, we would end up with about six feet of paper and 100-plus electronic files, which were then distributed to the various managers either electronically or in paper format, depending on which one they needed. That normally took about a day and a half of time each time we ran the budget process -- plus an additional half day to prep the system to produce all of those reports.

The fact that we now have what I'll call "fingertip access" has become second nature to us. Our financial liaisons can go in at any time to see what's going on, quickly drill down to it, see where something's happening, jump on the phone, ask the appropriate questions of the line-of-business managers. It happens every day.

Lorenz: It's their main tool that they use all day long. They're retrieving data and performing analyses all day.

King: Maybe the best way to say this is that with our old process and old system, it was a big deal to have a question, do the appropriate research, figure out exactly who to call. Having performance management software has completely changed our thinking.

When a question comes up about something like why actuals have a shortfall from forecast, answering it is no longer a big process where you have to put somebody on a project to go get the information. The mentality now is: "OK, hold on a second, let me pull it up, I've got it." Our response time has changed dramatically to the point where it's second nature.