Changing reporting into Financial Intelligence at the Fortune 500: CXO-Cockpit

For any chief financial officer (CFO), having up to date technology has become paramount when deploying a successful growth strategy. Whether it’s EPM systems, cloud accounting or cash forecasting tools, organizations around the world must constantly optimize their business processes. “But come reporting time, many of these solutions still aren’t replacing spreadsheets”, according to CEO Wouter Born, of software firm CXO Solutions. “And more importantly, these applications are unable to capture the key information behind the data that CFO’s at Fortune 500 companies need.”

The business processes of budgeting, planning, modeling, reporting, and analytics are all co-related and critical functions to the success of the organization. But despite having adopted sophisticated technologies like data analytics and artificial intelligence, companies still rely too much on Excel for reporting, Born explained. “CFO’s invest heavily in corporate performance management solutions to consolidate their financials and corporate plans, but still send out Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides to senior management and other stakeholders.”

Competitive advantage by management excellence

CFO’s that focus on achieving management excellence look to gain a competitive advantage, and CXO-Cockpit’s enterprise performance reporting system can help them succeed. By providing 24/7 real-time access to the most relevant financial information and insights that lead to faster decision making. “We have heard from CFO’s of Fortune 500 companies using CXO-Cockpit that they now look up everything they need between their kids’ football games,” says Born. “Previously they had to wait until Monday to ask a controller to generate the overview they needed.”

CXO-Cockpit is a performance reporting platform created by CXO Solutions, which was founded in 2007 by EPM and finance professionals. Frustrated with the lack of financial reporting functionality of the existing Excel and BI based tools, they developed pre-built and configurable Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) adapters. The adapters connect straight to the multi-dimensional financial data and inherits its hierarchies, structures and metadata, without IT dependence and costs. CXO-Cockpit therefore empowers finance with a centrally governed reporting process for data and commentary that enables compliance, collaboration and a faster close.

Aligning the C-level Suite

“We want to fill the gap between business intelligence tooling and the commonly used financial tools like Excel”, Born says. “I see us as a leading vendor aligning the, more and more cloud based, c-level software suite. With cloud technology, you take away the barriers of traditional enterprise infrastructure. We believe that ‘out-of-the-box’ cloud infrastructure building blocks can align the C-level suite by bringing the essential data together that stakeholders desperately need to make decisions. So, we will continue to provide a secure, narrative driven performance management solution serving executive users of Fortune 500 companies.” 

CXO-Cockpit’s projects have been relatively successful from day one. Wouter Born believes they were lucky because the early adopters really saw the value of their product. “The concept of our first product was to help enterprises to quickly setup dashboards on EPM systems like Hyperion using financial visualization best practices. Our first version was completely based on the input of a community of early adopters. You could compare this early adopter community to something like Kickstarter, but for enterprise software. We had warm Coke and cold pizza on the evenings before a new release, but our early adopters accepted bugs or missing features as long as we were dedicated to solve the highest priority issues as soon as possible.” 

Serving the largest enterprises in the world

With operations in both the US and Europe, CXO Solutions is an agile and forward-thinking company serving the largest enterprises in the world. “The thing that motivates me every day is to see how we, with a relatively small team, can have such an impact on the management effectiveness of Fortune 500 companies. We have been able to grow over the years with a very dedicated team that combines domain & technical knowledge and a strong, relevant network. Only with the right people onboard can we outperform our competitors.” 

In an ever-changing technology industry, CXO Solutions is continuously improving its offering and meeting up to the high expectations of their customers. Digital collaboration and advanced analytics support corporate performance with the use of both financial and non-financial data. In providing this combination to its customers it has become top ranked this year in Silicon Review “30 Fastest Growing Private Companies to watch” 

Let’s hear it from the CEO, Wouter Born 

After some years writing high tech code and implementing machine learning, Wouter Born entered the forefront of EPM consulting some 16 years ago. He and his colleagues saw the very real need for executive level EPM reporting so they left their consulting practice to create CXO-Cockpit. The combination of software development and consulting skills served Wouter well on his path to becoming the CTO and North American CEO at CXO-Solutions.

Leaving The Netherlands with his wife and kids in tow, Wouter established CXO-Solutions USA, Inc. in 2015. In between helping major multi-nationals obtain better visibility and control over their businesses, Wouter is an avid cyclist. Living in, a wonderful suburb of Atlanta, Wouter and his family have grown to love world travel as well as living in America.

“Focusing on the Office of Finance, CXO-Cockpit delivers the only Interactive EPM Dashboard and Reporting available for Desktop/Laptop, Tablet and Mobile Phone.”