As readers of this blog know, I think it's important for companies to regularly baseline their Finance organization to understand how effectively they're delivering services and how much it costs to deliver those services. The challenge is that collecting the necessary data is typically time consuming and fraught with errors and estimates as personnel manually collect the data.

An application highlighted at CFO.com aims to solve those problems. TrendView, from 3cInsight, is a Software-as-a-Service solution that captures data from an organization's transactional systems to automate the data collection process. (Full disclosure: 3cInsight's Director of Operations, Kelly Noto, and I worked together at The Hackett Group). There are approximately 300 pre-defined metrics that a company can use to evaluate it's performance.

That's the baseline side of the equation. It's the intention of 3cInsight to aggregate the data from its customers into meaningful benchmark data so that the companies will have access to the data without having to commission a formal benchmark every few years. As of now 3CInsight has around 20 customers, which isn't necessarily large enough to smooth out outlying data points. However, as the company grows its customer base this problem will be eliminated.

It sounds like a great idea and I wish 3cInsight the best.

Here's the link to the full story:

CFO.com article on TrendView application