Enterprise Capital Planning Software
UMT360’s Capital Planning Software makes sure every dollar invested is continuously aligned with business strategy.
Stand-alone PPM and work management tools typically relegate cost data to second-class citizen status – making it difficult for PMOs to gain visibility and optimize spend.
UMT360 Cost Management Accelerator Key Features
UMT360’s Cost Management and Capital Planning Accelerator elevates cost data to the same level of importance as schedule and resource data, enabling PMOs to deploy the right financial governance controls needed to become CFO of portfolios.
Top-Down Budgeting
Corporate capital planning software provides a top-down view of all projected costs to support both traditional annual planning and dynamic/continuous planning.
- Establish hierarchical enterprise portfolio model in order to support top-down budgeting at any level (products, value streams, programs, initiatives, portfolios)
- Supports ability to allocate and govern funds by value stream
- Dynamically aggregate financial information from underlying execution (projects or epics) and compare/contrast
- Supports annual planning model and/or dynamic/continuous planning model through block/incremental funding
Capturing Cost Estimates
Consolidate and streamline the standardized capture of cost estimates across a wide variety of dimensions.
- Demand management tools hep capture & associate time-phased cost estimates directly from business cases
- Break down costs by configurable categories like labor or non-labor, and by allocation centers or funding sources
- Progressively elaborates the presentation of project financial data to provide more detail as initiatives progress
- Establish the appropriate approval controls
- Integrated snap shots help you maintain auditable records of all changes
- Establish framework to plan for and manage contingencies
Enterprise Budget Tracking & Forecasting
Standardizes and streamlines the process of financial reconciliation.
- Automatically capture actual costs from ERP systems, and compare/contrast
- Reforecast remainder of budget mid-stream to provide clear idea of completion
- Gain real time visibility into variance between budgets and actuals
- Take Snapshots across the portfolio at any time to support monthly status reporting or quarterly forecasting
- Dynamically roll-up actuals and forecasts within your portfolio hierarchy
- Report on commitments and track performance of individual POs
Continuous Capital Planning & Reallocation
Provides ability for all investment owners to forecast cost and maintain multi-year roadmap, supporting the dynamic needs of a continuous planning approach.
- Assess all investments, see overall performance of portfolio, and identify opportunities to adjust
- Automate change management process to govern incremental funding requests and releases
- Maintain auditable record of each specific decision and the resulting changes
- Maintain a multi-year strategic roadmap while still providing enterprise finance team with the updated annual view they require
Align & Analyze Enterprise Fiscal Planning
Quickly and easily run what-if scenarios – in just a fraction of the time – and show the impact of any proposed change to your project and program portfolio costs.
- Scenario Planning capabilities enable you to quickly create and analyze portfolio plans
- Interactive roadmapping software helps you model the effect of any portfolio change
- Visualize and manage all project and portfolio cost information in one place.
- Maximize benefits and conduct target analysis
Fine-Tune Governance Controls
Provide the right level of governance to all stakeholders to provide an auditable trail of cost information across the lifecycle of your portfolio.
- Standardize hierarchical cost structure and dimensions
- Determine what information is required at each stage of lifecycle
- Integrated snapshots enable auditable record at any stage of progress
- Automate funding approvals
- Supports multi-currency capabilities
See UMT360 Cost Management Accelerator In Action!
Create a model of your organization’s capital expenses
Reserve your software demo to see how UMT360’s Cost Management and Capital Planning Accelerator elevates cost data to the same level of importance as schedule and resource data. Learn how deploying the right financial governance controls can help your PMO become the CFO of your portfolios.
What you’ll see during this Cost Management Accelerator Demo:
- Capabilities to help you move from a project-based to product-based / bulk-funding model
- Capture comprehensive budgets in a business case
- Streamline cost tracking and forecasting
- Run multi-year fiscal planning scenario analysis
- Maintain near-term and multi-year strategic roadmaps
Book an Interactive Demo
Quick and easy integration with a variety of project management tools
Get up and running quickly and integrate roadmaps with both traditional PPM project management and Agile work management tools.
- Get started quickly by importing projects, epics and more, along with associated data from Excel
- Utilize out-of-the-box connectors to easily sync projects and milestones from Microsoft Project, Jira, Azure Boards and other platforms
- Powerful connectors provide real-time integration with project execution tools to ensure your roadmaps are always up-to-date
Part of UMT360’s comprehensive strategic portfolio management platform
Need a specific Portfolio Management Accelerator right now? Let’s get started! Each one delivers powerful stand-alone capabilities that you can have up and running in just a few days. And since they all complement each other, it’s easy to add additional capabilities – in any order you’d like – whenever you’re ready. Best of all, each is part of UMT360’s comprehensive Strategic Portfolio Management Platform. Which means that with every Accelerator you add, you’re that much closer to having all the capabilities you need to align all investments with strategy and ultimately accelerate digital transformation.
Get the project portfolio management capabilities you need, quickly and easily
Every UMT360 Strategy Execution Accelerator is designed to be implemented quickly with a minimum amount of consulting or configuration. Leveraging best practices garnered from years of successful client engagements, these powerful Accelerators provide precisely the capabilities you need, without weeks or months of configuration.
Roadmapping & Release Management
Roadmaps are powerful tools to help ensure that all investment decisions are clearly understood across the organization. By visualizing and communicating key dependencies enterprise-wide, roadmaps serve to help harmonize decisions and track progress across all investments.
Resource Management & Capacity Planning
Resources must now be managed across agile, waterfall or even non-project-orientated work systems. Gaining visibility across all resources – and optimizing utilization and capacity planning – is a critical challenge for any organization hoping to fully realize its business strategy.
What-If Scenario Analysis
Generating what-if scenarios and modeling potential outcomes based on ad-hoc questions used to require teams to stay late and manually crunch numbers. But what if you had the tools to respond to any possible question about any portfolio with just a few clicks?
Demand & Innovation Management
You never know where project requests might come from. But one thing is clear, to do more than simply choose the best from a bad list of ideas, you’ll need a robust demand management solution to provide enhanced visibility across all work
Benefits Realization & Outcome Management
UMT360’s strategic portfolio management solution provides a centralized hub that makes it easy to break down strategy, define its components, map it to the associated execution and communicate it to all relevant stakeholders across the enterprise. Quickly derive all execution directly from the strategy, and generate work that is perfectly aligned with strategy.
Cost Management & Capital Planning
Business agility requires that all investment be continuously aligned with business strategy. That’s why UMT360 helps organizations elevate cost data to the same level of importance as schedule and resource data, enabling PMOs to deploy the right financial governance controls needed to become CFO of portfolios.
The Importance of a Comprehensive Capital Planning Software Solution
Strategic Portfolio Management can help PMOs become the CFO of Project & Program Portfolios in order to optimize cost and maximize value.
Progressive PMOs and EPMOs are moving away from a strictly execution-oriented mindset toward one focused on orchestrating business transformation. In addition to managing execution, they also need to treat all projects and programs as the strategic business investments they are, and take responsibility for maximizing value and optimizing project and program spend. Learn more in our guide to setting up a PMO.
Why Project Managers Need to Embrace Cost Transparency
Project managers are fundamentally responsible for managing the project budget. Traditionally they operate based on a fixed project budget. This static way of thinking doesn’t align with agile strategic planning, which requires project managers to adapt to changes in prioritization, budgets, and solutions. Financial visibility enables project managers to alert the SRO to changes in resources, backlogs, and cost overruns. It also allows the portfolio managers to take immediate action to rebalance financial resources to realize the organization’s strategic goals.
How Do You Manage Project Costs Effectively?
Cost controls must be integrated across the project governance lifecycle to ensure that the right cost data is captured at each step in the project schedule. This includes standardizing project cost structures and cost centers and defining the interaction and integration with the ERP system. If the goal is to effectively connect the PPM and Finance teams, then it’s critical to ensure that product, program and portfolio managers have financial data they need at their fingertips for agile project management.
Improve Cost Estimating / Budgeting with Financial Visibility
The dirty secret when it comes to cost estimates is that they are usually not worth the paper they are written on. This is primarily because at the early stages of an investment’s life, high level ROM estimates are all that’s asked for. But if financial estimates can be progressively expanded and become more detailed throughout a project’s planning lifecycle, the accuracy of estimates can improve over time. Which is why organizations need to provide support for both top-down and bottom-up budgeting that is aligned with the composition of their portfolio model (e.g. Portfolio -> Program -> project) and execution styles (e.g. Agile / Product based approaches with block funding).
Better Cost Performance and Tracking with Strategic Portfolio Management
For most organizations, project cost tracking and variance analysis is an area that is ripe for improvement. Areas of focus include better integration with ERP systems to pull in actual real-time data, and a more effective interface between PPM and business systems that makes it easier to reforecast costs and streamline / automate the month-end financial reconciliation process.
Real-Time data from ERP Systems
Armed with real-time variance metrics, organizations can visualize project cost performance, quickly identify and gain insight into areas of concern and take the appropriate corrective action. The ability to more effectively manage change requests is also key to rebalancing the portfolio with redirects, releases and takebacks. Real-time data is critical to achieve project visibility.
Enabling Project Visibility Across the Organization
Real time visibility is crucial for more than just project managers. By having visibility into project progress and cost overruns, project teams can become more agile and better control execution. Increased transparency leads to better project execution, quicker feedback, and better performance.
Treat Projects as Strategic Business Investments
Project managers need to move beyond the basics of managing project tasks, team members, and fixed budgets. Resources need to be monitored and adjusted as needed to accomplish the strategic business goals.
Continuous Planning Helps to Manage Costs
Taking an annual view of project investments (based on fiscal year) is an approach that might work well for the finance team. But PPM stakeholders require a more dynamic approach which enables them to continuously optimize project spend and maximize value across their project portfolio and near + long term roadmaps.
Project Managers Provide Life Cycle Estimates
Ideally, the project manager provides full lifecycle estimates and forecasts so the organization can effectively manage the value / cost (Yield) of all investment projects.
Portfolio Managers Rebalance Project Resources in Real-Time
Portfolio managers – armed with the full lifecycle costs and variance analysis – can then effectively rebalance the portfolio at a regular cadence.
Roadmapping is Key to Project Success
Maintaining a multi-year roadmap streamlines the annual planning process, enabling the PMO to provide the finance team with annual spend projections while still maintaining a multi-year / full lifecycle view. That’s why real-time visibility is a critical prerequisite to Strategic Portfolio Management.
Learn Why Strategic Portfolio Management is Critical to Enterprise Success
Any enterprise looking to drive growth and fuel a competitive advantage must first connect and align all execution with strategy. UMT360’s solution provides all the portfolio planning capabilities needed to establish both the top-down business planning and bottom-up controls required to integrate all portfolios and improve project execution to accelerate business transformation.
Enterprise Capital Planning Software
UMT360’s Capital Planning Software makes sure every dollar invested is continuously aligned with business strategy.