Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to understand all the factors that drive their products' gross margins. The presence of global product portfolios with varying accounting standars makes the process of generating accurate gross margin data extremely difficult. The fact that thios information is spread across multiple isolated systems makes the process even more time consuming and challenging. Companies with diverse supply chains, vendors, products, and information systems find it hard to identify the true cost of a particular product. Furthermore it is vital to continuously measure a firm's sales performance against the plan/forecast. Identifying the root causes for variances from the plan/forecast consumes significant time and resources of sales executives.
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) are useful for planning and executing transactions, but these systems may not be optimal fo the in-depth reporting and analysis activities needed to identify opportunities to improve gross margins, to identify poorly performing product lines, regions or business units, to understand revenue drivers, to gain insight into customer buying trends, or to monitor on-going performance.