The Planning System That Had Nothing to Plan With
North America's largest home appliance manufacturer spent 30 months and USD 5.1 million building an EPM system that couldn't answer a single strategic question. The problem wasn't the technology — it was the sequence. SAP BPC came first. SAP PaPM came second. The cost model never came at all. Pedro San Martín of Asher & Company shows why building planning before costing is the most expensive mistake in enterprise performance management — and how Oracle EPM fixed it by starting where every model must start: with the cost.
When the Tax Shelter Becomes the Burning Building
A pharma multinational running operations across Florida, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and the Dominican Republic had a BEPS-compliant transfer pricing structure — and a profitability problem no one could explain. Pedro San Martín of Asher & Company shows how Oracle EPCM Profitability and Cost Management exposed a USD 57.8M cost gap hiding in plain sight, and why the real battle wasn't with the tax authority. It was with the operating model.
The Mine That Knew Too Much and Decided Too Little
In 2003, I was part of the PwC team deployed to Industrias Peñoles at Mina Proaño — one of the deepest silver mines in the world, operating since 1554. Silver was under pressure. Costs were rising. And nobody could tell management which parts of the mountain were worth digging. This is the story of how PeopleSoft ABM and Metify Predictive Planning built the first zone-level profitability map in the mine's 450-year history — and forced the hardest operational decision I've seen in twenty years of EPM work.