Integration of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software with common BI tools allows an organization to combine, manage and analyze financial performance data and blend it with operational data (like an internal data warehouse). This provides the organization with more uses for data that would otherwise be exclusive to the CPM tool.
Scenario: A mid-market enterprise uses CPM software for tracking and managing its financial performance. They use Tableau for analyzing intensive transaction-level detail in their data warehouse. They'd like to blend their transactional analysis with their performance goals in the CPM tool. Right now, they must do this manually.
Solution: By selecting a CPM tool that allows access to its API by BI platforms, the customer now has more uses for their CPM data. They can bring in certain metrics used to measure the health of the business to the BI tool, cross reference that with transaction trends, and make sure they're tracking in the middle of a period.
The real question here is, do you offer an open API that external reporting and analytics tools can connect to? And the other question is, why would you want to do that in the first place? We see this request often, mostly IT folks asking if they can connect a BI tool to the CPM platform. We ask them why, and they're unsure. They simply want to know if its possible.
When it comes to use cases for BI + CPM, it usually comes down to transactions vs summarized data. BI tools can get granular and report on huge amounts of data. CPM tools are meant to be big picture, at least from an analysis standpoint.