A group in KAFD still budgeting in spreadsheets despite running Oracle EPM Cloud never actually redesigned the planning process, just moved it onto a new platform.

EPM sits above the transactional ERP. It takes actuals from Fusion or any other ledger and supports the processes finance runs on top of them: annual budgets, rolling forecasts, multi-entity consolidation, management reporting and scenario modeling. For groups still consolidating in spreadsheets, or migrating from Hyperion, it is usually the single largest improvement available to the finance function's credibility with the board.

Planning and budgeting

The Planning module supports driver-based budgets, workforce and capital planning, and rolling forecasts with version control and approval workflow. The design work is in defining the drivers and the level of detail: a Saudi contracting group plans revenue by project and phase, a distribution business by product line and region, a services firm by headcount and utilization. Getting this granularity right, neither so coarse it is meaningless nor so fine nobody maintains it, is where our budgeting experience matters.

Financial consolidation and close

Financial Consolidation and Close automates intercompany elimination, currency translation, minority interest and the consolidation journal that multi-entity Riyadh groups otherwise build by hand every month. It also produces the audit trail that external auditors and, increasingly, ZATCA expect. The configuration must reflect your actual ownership structure, and it must handle Hijri and Gregorian period alignment where entities report on different calendars.

Management reporting

EPM's reporting layer produces board packs, variance analysis and KPI dashboards in Arabic and English from a single governed data set. The value is consistency: when the CEO, CFO and board all look at the same numbers derived the same way, the monthly meeting stops being a reconciliation exercise. We link this to broader forecasting and reporting design so the outputs answer the questions leadership actually asks.

A common Saudi scenario

An Riyadh industrial group with seven entities takes four weeks to produce its consolidated monthly pack, most of it spent reconciling intercompany balances across spreadsheets. EPM Financial Consolidation is implemented with automated eliminations and a standard close calendar. The pack is available on working day eight, with a full audit trail, and the finance team's month is freed for analysis rather than assembly.

Implementation scope

EPM projects are typically four to eight months depending on modules. The critical success factor is redesigning the process before configuring the tool. A budget process that took three months of back-and-forth in Excel will take three months in EPM too, unless the number of iterations, the level of detail and the approval chain are rethought first.

Governance of the planning cycle

EPM makes it possible to run many forecast versions, which is only useful if someone decides how many you actually need. We help define the planning calendar, who owns each input, how long each approval step may take and when a version is locked. Without that governance the tool reproduces the endless revision cycle it was meant to replace, only faster.

Local context

Riyadh-based holding companies with listed or pre-IPO subsidiaries adopt EPM consolidation earliest, driven by CMA reporting timelines.