Business Planning & Management
The turbulent economy has driven many organizations to embrace portfolio management techniques to enhance existing project and resource management processes and effectively optimize scarce budgets and align initiatives with business priorities. This strategic focus has in turn increased the importance of integrating financial management best practices across the entire project lifecycle. Today, connecting the worlds of corporate and project accounting has become a priority for companies implementing project portfolio management (PPM) processes and tools.
For many organizations, financial budgeting and planning still remains a manual and time consuming endeavor with analysts and executives relying on complex and disconnected Excel spreadsheets to drive the capital planning process.
Business & Planning Management powered by UMT Project Essentials
UMT Project Essentials seamlessly extends Microsoft Project Server 2010 to effectively bridge the worlds of corporate and project accounting to provide integrated Business Planning & Management capabilities across the entire PPM lifecycle.
UMT Project Essentials helps financial analysts, executives and PMOs:
- Connect disparate financial and PPM systems to streamline the Capital Planning process
- Establish financial governance controls to standardize data collection
- Improve project cost and benefit estimating accuracy
- Gain visibility and control across all demand and improve investment decisions
- Effectively track project and portfolio financial performance
- Implement a benefits realization framework to measure results
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Seamless Governance & Financial Controls
UMT Project Essentials helps PMOs and Finance teams quickly define simple or complex financial structures (e.g. cost, benefit, cashflow etc.) and utilize an intuitive workflow designer to build and publish governance processes to standardize data collection and establish investment controls across the PPM lifecycle.
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Accurate & Reliable Budgeting & Allocations
UMT Project Essentials helps project stakeholders and analysts collaborate to improve the accuracy of cost and benefit estimates for all project requests. The solution ensures cost estimates can be broken down by allocation center to request funding from one or more line of business.
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Visibility Across all Demand
UMT Project Essentials provides support for top down and bottom up budgeting, helping to maintain departmental budgets and rollup the funding requests to provide visibility across all demand. The solution helps executives effectively evaluate competing initiatives and select projects that will maximize ROI and align with strategic priorities. UMT Project Essentials maintains an auditable record of funding decisions and dynamically locks the budget for approved projects.
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Track Project Financial Performance
UMT Project Essentials includes powerful financial status reports and an intuitive change request module to effectively track project financial performance and request incremental funding. Financial status reports compare actual and forecast costs with the approved budget to derive real-time variance metrics for each project. The change request module helps Project Managers submit incremental funding requests for approval. If approved, the project’s budget is dynamically updated to reflect the incremental investment.
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Effective Chargeback Framework
UMT Project Essentials helps finance teams to implement a chargeback framework to effectively allocate project costs to departments. By breaking down budget, actual and forecast costs by allocation center, business owners can quickly gain transparency into remaining budget and gauge the financial performance of the initiatives they have committed to fund.
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Powerful Business Intelligence & Analytics
UMT Project Essentials utilizes familiar Microsoft Business Intelligence tools such as Excel Services, Visio Services, and PerformancePoint Services to provide interactive reports and dashboards to help executives measure financial performance across portfolios, visualize early warning indicators and drill down to take corrective action as needed.
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Track Benefits and Measure Results
UMT Project Essentials provides a benefits realization framework to help evaluate whether each initiative realized the anticipated results. This ensures that stakeholders are held accountable for project results, which in turn helps to drive accurate and realistic ROI predictions
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