— Capex Software for Project Prioritization —
How a leading industrial company prioritizes 200+ annual projects.
Challenge: Every Project Feels Like it's a High Priority
It seemed as if the pipeline always exceeded the budget. Though submitted requests for equipment upgrades, capacity expansions, efficiency projects and such each had a legitimate business case, there lacked a consistent framework for deciding what got funded and what didn’t.
Without uniform scoring, high-visibility projects often advanced while strategically essential ones stalled. And when conditions shifted mid-year, like they seemed to always do, there was no reliable mechanism to re-rank the portfolio against the new reality in a reasonable amount of time.
The result: capital got deployed systematically, rather than strategically. Projects that could have anchored the plan got deferred. And when leadership was questioned why specific elements of the portfolio didn’t reflect the company’s stated priorities, there wasn’t a convincing answer.
Opportunity: Modeling consistency & Stack Ranking
This company understood it needed a structured framework to evaluate every project on the same terms, and a platform that made those decisions visible and defensible across the organization.
With Finario, every capital request can be assessed against configurable criteria including NPV, IRR and Payback. The system also lets every project carry three versions of the story: what happens if we do it, what happens if we don’t, and what actually happened after we did. Each year’s benefit can also be tagged with a probability (“70% sure”), which helps reduce optimism bias.
When conditions change, the platform also supports dynamic reprioritization: redirecting capital to projects that better reflect current strategic realities. Every decision is documented with the underlying data.
Finario’s stack ranking lets you clearly and visually see how including, or excluding individual projects will impact your budget, forecast, and returns
A 5-Point Cost Control Action Plan
Establish a standard evaluation template for every material capital request.
Require all submissions to include the same core data: strategic rationale, cost and benefit estimates, risk assessment, and alignment to defined business objectives.
Define and weight your scoring criteria before the budget cycle opens.
Prioritize dimensions and their relative weights: growth, efficiency, compliance, safety, sustainability and so forth. The framework should reflect actual strategy, not just what’s easiest to measure.
Score projects against strategic objectives, not just financial returns.
ROI matters, but not every high-value project has a short payback period, and not every compliance or safety investment has a calculable return. Make sure there is a mechanism to capture this.
Stress-test the portfolio before committing.
Run alternative portfolio configurations to understand the tradeoffs of different funding decisions using Finario’s stack ranking capabilities. What happens if you defer Project A to accelerate Project B? Which combination of projects best balances near-term operational stability with long-term growth?
Require reforecasts at defined project milestones.
Don't wait for year-end to discover that a project's trajectory has changed. Require updated cost forecasts at key milestones — design completion, contract award and major procurement, for example — so the portfolio view always reflects the current reality.
Trusted by industrial enterprises worldwide
Finario allows us to collaborate in a seamless way with finance. The start of projects and getting things approved has greatly improved. And same with closing projects. Closing projects is laborious and nobody wants to do it, but with Finario it actually makes it pretty simple.
ENGINEERING LEAD, FOOD & BEVERAGE MANUFACTURER
Executive leadership can now easily weed out smaller projects and have all the information they need for the higher value investments right at their fingertips.
Operations Controller, Consumer Goods
Finario is adding tremendous value in completing our post-completion reviews.
FP&A EXECUTIVE, METALS
