Welcome to Centage’s blog series, Meet the Maestros. In these posts, we give you the opportunity to get to know some of the team at Centage who are working to make budgeting and forecasting easier and more accurate for small to medium size companies.
In this issue, we’ve gathered insights from Centage’s Chief Products Officer, Ed Gromann.
What does advocating for the customer mean at Centage?
“Customers are the life force of any business,” says Ed. He’s clear on how important customers and the customer experience is to Centage, and to him. “We continually strive to improve our user experience through a variety of touchpoints, including phone support, health-checks and on-site meetings, just to name a few.” Ed believes in the importance of the voice of the customer so much, he makes sure to participate in gathering this important feedback directly by periodically participating in customer implementations. It goes beyond ensuring Centage is delivering success to their customers. “These on-site engagements serve another purpose: It allows me to observe the customer’s reaction to new features and functions and solicit their opinion for improvement. It becomes a personal focus group.”
What are small to medium businesses looking for in FP&A software?
Many of the organizations that come to Centage have been, until then, using Excel for planning and budgeting. Ed explains that “Although this solution works OK for a short period of time, it inevitably becomes convoluted and painful.” When companies turn to Centage, they want to improve their processes, which have become overly complicated. “We streamline the process,” Ed says, “ensure GAAP compliance and give people back time to do more value-added activities, such as proactive analysis.”
How has data visualization changed and grown in the industry, and where is it headed?
“Data visualization has always been around,” Ed states. However, recent improvements have made visualizations more accessible. “Products such as Microsoft Power BI, transform data into beautiful graphical representations,” Ed explains. But it won’t stop there. Ed continues, “I believe it will continue to improve, making it easier to bring in a variety of data sources and see the results in a visual fashion. Ultimately, the interpretation of the data will become increasingly intuitive.”
With experts like Ed Gromann as part of our team, it’s no wonder that organizations of every size rely on Centage Corporation’s Maestro Suite of solutions which includes Budget Maestro™ to help them make budgeting and forecasting easier and more accurate. Budget Maestro improves the efficiency and effectiveness of business budgeting and planning, financial forecasting, financial consolidation and reporting processes. For more information, take a tour of Budget Maestro, contact Centage, or call 800-366-5111 now.