In order to grow profitability over the long term, businesses must adapt quickly to continuously changing market needs and efficiently manage their supply chains to optimally address those changing needs. A critical component of change strategies for improved profits and margins is tight control of costs. Effective cost management impacts the entire enterprise and requires that companies adapt to change quickly.
Adopting such changes presents added challenges when trying to grow margins and maximize revenue/profits while simultaneously attempting to streamline budgeting, consolidate financials, and meet on-time statutory reporting. While most businesses want to successfully manage their costs so as to monitor the impact of cost changes on margins, maximize resource allocations, and optimize their product mix, that is much easier said than done for most companies today.

Today, large manufacturing organizations struggle to assess cost information at a sufficiently granular level because the available tools typically have poor response times when processing complex data such as a multi-level bills of material with their associated part costs, supplier data, and sales/revenue numbers.
Because cost management remains highly manual and decentralized, organizations that want to perform detailed cost analysis often cannot access the information quickly enough to take actionable decisions that benefit the businesses in time to make a difference.