Broken Processes
Deserve More Than
New Software

The Value Realization Finance Leaders Are Ignoring

The numbers on enterprise system initiatives are unambiguous. Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business case goals, with as many as 25% failing catastrophically.¹ The same research finds that 75% of ERP strategies are not strongly aligned with overall business strategy, which Gartner identifies as a leading cause of confusion and lackluster results.

Bain & Company, drawing on a 2024 survey of more than 400 executives and senior leaders, found that only about 12% of business transformations achieve their original ambitions.² McKinsey's research on organizational transformation reaches a consistent conclusion: culture and readiness, not technology, are the biggest obstacles to success. Organizations fail when they treat transformation as a technology upgrade rather than a business change.³

These findings apply to enterprise software broadly, and EPM implementations are not exempt. The software on the market today is mature, proven, and capable. What fails is everything around it: unexamined processes and organizations asked to adopt systems built on assumptions nobody validated.

The Technology-First Trap

When a CFO mandates an EPM investment, the instinct is understandable: the organization is spending too much time building spreadsheets, the close takes too long, and forecast accuracy is poor. Software vendors are skilled at mapping these pain points to product features. A demo shows seamless consolidations, beautiful dashboards, and scenario modeling at the click of a button.

The organization signs the contract. The implementation begins. And within six months, the team is rebuilding the same 47-tab Excel model, just inside a more expensive tool.

The core error is treating EPM as an IT deployment rather than an operating model shift. When implementation begins before process questions are resolved, three predictable patterns emerge:

• Garbage-In, Garbage-Out at Scale. Dirty data hierarchies, inconsistent chart of accounts structures, and ambiguous cost center ownership get codified into the system's data model. What was previously a manual workaround becomes a permanent architectural constraint.
• Shadow Systems Persist. Users who don't trust the output maintain parallel spreadsheets. The EPM becomes a reporting layer bolted onto the actual planning process, not a replacement for it.
• Scope Creep Driven by Undefined Requirements. Without a clear process blueprint, every stakeholder interprets the system's purpose differently. Without process decisions made upstream, the implementation tries to be everything and succeeds at nothing.

A Cautionary Tale

Consider a regional food and beverage manufacturer that engaged a leading EPM vendor after years of close cycles stretching past 15 business days and forecast accuracy hovering around 60%. The demo was compelling. The contract was signed. Implementation began.

Eight months in, the project was behind schedule and over budget. Finance and the business units had never agreed on how shared manufacturing costs would be allocated, who owned the revenue forecast at the SKU level, or which system was the authoritative source for actuals when the ERP and the plant floor systems disagreed. These were not new problems. They were old disagreements that the implementation had forced into the open at the worst possible time.

The organization paused the implementation, spent six weeks resolving the process and governance questions they had skipped, and relaunched configuration. The second pass took four months. Total project time: fourteen months — nearly double the original estimate, and entirely avoidable.

Why Process Must Come First

Process-first EPM is not an argument against technology. It is an argument for sequencing. A modern EPM platform is genuinely powerful, but that power is only accessible when the organization has resolved the decisions the system is being asked to support.

Process clarity answers three questions that no software vendor can answer on your behalf:

• What decisions does our planning process need to enable? Not: what reports do we want?
• Who owns each decision, and at what level of granularity?
• What is the minimum data required to make each decision with confidence?

These questions are difficult. They require cross-functional alignment, executive sponsorship, and often a willingness to redesign workflows that have existed for years. The organizations that answer these questions before selecting a platform achieve dramatically better outcomes: faster implementations, higher adoption, and planning cycles that genuinely improve the quality of decisions made by the business.

A Process-First EPM Framework

Organizations that successfully transform their EPM capabilities share a common sequencing. They resolve process before platform, governance before configuration, and adoption strategy before go-live.

Where Process Clarity Matters Most

EPM platforms are powerful, but the following capabilities are even more impactful when process is properly defined before configuration begins:

• Chart of Accounts and Dimension Design. How does the business want to slice performance, and is there consensus before the data model is built?
• Planning and Budgeting. Who submits what, at what granularity, on what calendar, and through what approval workflow?
• Forecasting and Rolling Estimates. How often do we reforecast, who owns it, and what is the horizon?
• Financial Close and Consolidation. What is the sequencing, ownership, and reconciliation tolerance for each step of the close?
• Allocations and Cost Modeling. What is the agreed methodology for distributing shared costs, and who has authority to change it?
• Workforce and Headcount Planning. At what level of detail do Finance, HR, and the business jointly plan and model compensation?
• Reporting and Management Hierarchy. Which hierarchy drives which report, and who owns hierarchy maintenance as the organization evolves?
• Data Integration and Source System Ownership. What is the authoritative source for actuals, and how are discrepancies between systems resolved?

Process-First in Practice

Across EPM implementations, the engagements that deliver fastest share a common front end: a focused process optimization phase that precedes platform work. Four practices define it.

• Cross-functional process workshops. Finance, IT, and business owners map the close, consolidation, and planning processes together. The disagreements that surface in week two of a workshop are the same ones that would surface in month seven of an implementation, at twenty times the cost.
• One ratified chart of accounts before any system build. Hierarchies, dimensions, and metric definitions get debated, decided, and signed off by name. The implementation team inherits decisions, not open questions.
• A kill list. Every report, reconciliation, and process step earns its place in the future state or it dies in the transition. The reports nobody fights for were nobody's requirement.
• Named process owners before the implementation partner arrives. Ownership assigned during design survives go-live. Ownership assigned during a steering committee escalation does not.

A Readiness Test You Can Run This Quarter

Before signing an EPM contract, put these six questions to your finance leadership team. Mostly confident answers mean your processes are ready to be elevated by a platform. Mostly uncomfortable answers mean an implementation today would automate your current state, not transform it.

The Competitive Advantage of Process Clarity

The most dangerous moment in an EPM journey is when a vendor demo makes the technology look easy. Modern platforms are visually compelling, and the gap between demo and production reality is rarely a technology gap. It is almost always a process gap: a conversation the organization has not had yet about who owns what, what good looks like, and what decisions the system is actually being asked to support.

CFOs who close that gap before signing a contract consistently outperform those who don't. Their implementations run faster, cost less to maintain, and produce planning outputs that leadership actually uses. More importantly, their organizations build a process muscle that outlasts any single platform decision.

If the honest answer is not yet, that is not a reason to delay the EPM journey. It is a reason to start it differently.

How Thought Logic Partners on Process-First Transformation