Skokie, IL - (PRWEB) January 11, 2016
Kaufman Hall, a leading provider of management consulting services and enterprise performance management software, today announced an increase in demand for its higher education solutions. With mounting pressures on enrollment and tuition, uncertain future funding, and emerging competitive disruption, today’s higher education institutions require their finance teams to not only better manage revenues and costs, but to become more strategic advisors. This means an evolution towards spending less time on data aggregation and more time on value-added analytics and reporting, including the use of initiative-based scenario modeling to aid the development of more effective long-range plans.
Kaufman Hall is helping senior business officers and finance professionals in higher education meet these challenges through a unique combination of consulting expertise in financial management best practices and its Axiom EPM performance management software suite. The result is long-range planning, debt management and operating budgeting coming together in a single unified approach where university business officers set overall financial targets to support the school's mission and aspirations, and then operationalize those high-level plans into budgets, forecasts and analytics to course-correct as conditions change. Universities working with Kaufman Hall to improve performance management include Tufts University, Emory University, Northwestern University, University of Kentucky, University of New England, Furman University, George Washington University, the University of Toledo, Yale University, Stanford University, and Bellevue University.
“Our higher education customers find tremendous value in working with a partner that provides both expertise and tailored software solutions based on years of experience implementing best-practice solutions for hundreds of universities and academic medical centers across the country,” said Charles Kim, Managing Director and head of the Higher Education practice at Kaufman Hall. “We are dedicated to providing a consistent approach for disciplined financial planning, combined with sophisticated, easy to use software that enables institutions to effectively plan and manage performance in both the short- and long-term.”
Axiom EPM, Kaufman Hall’s integrated planning software, enables higher education finance teams to streamline processes institution-wide by consolidating financial and operational data from multiple sources, from which detailed department or executive-level reports can be produced. The suite includes solutions for long-range planning, budgeting and forecasting, reporting and analytics, enrollment planning, grant planning, capital planning and student financial aid planning.
Increasingly, more institutions are looking to leverage cloud technology to help eliminate overhead time and expenses, optimize system performance, streamline upgrades and cut down on implementation timeframes. “We faced aggressive timelines to implement, and the cloud offering from Axiom EPM helped us stay on track without having to spend time setting up any sort of on-premise infrastructure,” said Steve Lisa, ERP Manager at Tufts University. “We felt comfortable and confident that it was absolutely the right direction to go, not only because of the time to deploy, but also because of the security, quick data integration and end-user access it provided us.”
“Through our work with leading academic institutions, we have proven the ability to effectively support the higher education market in strategically managing financial outcomes and leveraging analytics for improved decision making,” said Kim. “We look forward to expanding our work in helping public and private institutions improve the way they manage financial performance in uncertain times.”
About Kaufman Hall
Since 1985, Kaufman Hall has been a leading advisor to senior management teams and boards of the nation’s most distinguished institutions, helping them to incorporate proven methods into their strategic planning and financial management, quantify the financial impact of their plans and actions, and consistently achieve their goals. Our services use a rigorous, disciplined, and structured approach that is based on the principles of corporate finance.
The breadth and integration of our advisory services is unparalleled. Services encompass strategy; financial and capital planning; debt and derivatives-related financial transactions; capital allocation and decision making; and mergers, acquisitions, real estate, and joint ventures. No other professional services firm operating in the non-profit education and healthcare sector combines all of these services under a single corporate umbrella.
To complement our advisory services, for more than 20 years Kaufman Hall has provided software products that support decision-making processes and sustainable strategies and plans. In 2014, Kaufman Hall acquired Axiom EPM, a leading provider of planning systems to higher education. The acquisition of Axiom has provided Kaufman Hall with a world-class software platform, creating a unified company with unmatched expertise and experience in data-driven analysis to transform financial, operational, and strategic planning.
Axiom EPM offers the industry’s leading enterprise performance platform that has been built for finance users on modern technology. Axiom EPM is configured specifically for higher education and includes solutions for long-range planning, budgeting & forecasting, enrollment planning, grants planning, student aid planning, reporting and analytics on a single, integrated software platform that is easy to use and promotes broad organizational adoption. Axiom EPM embraces and extends Microsoft Excel® functionality, allowing finance professionals to manage data in a familiar environment – while providing unmatched modeling flexibility and enterprise performance.
Axiom EPM software has consistently received the top customer satisfaction ratings in the industry across a variety of dimensions including overall experience, implementation and support in 3rd party studies by both Gartner and BPM Partners.
For more information, visit kaufmanhall.com/highereducation to learn more about our service offerings and axiomepm.com/highereducation to learn more about our industry leading software capabilities.