Leverage financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting Build budgets, forecasts, and operational and strategic plans. Deliver workforce planning and budgeting Design employee-based budgets and plans.
Take advantage of sales planning Create sales plans with analysis of existing trends and what-if scenarios. Monitor capital expenses planning Leverage capital project management with documentation packages and overview of statuses and approvals. Deliver financial consolidation Manage complex ownership structures, multiple currencies, and inter-company transactions. Manage financial reporting Utilize highly formatted standard and flexible self-service reporting.
Customer success. Budgeting and planning. Organizations may look to budgeting and forecasting software to get a complete picture of their financials. Outside of financials, it will need to rely on enterprise performance management software tools to get information on performance related to the blueprints and enterprise strategies your company has or is looking to put into action. EPM Software vs. Enterprise Performance Management software, or EPM software, helps monitor business performance according to key performance indicators KPIs and tracks your progress towards whatever performance metrics your business is working towards.
These include sales, marketing, operations, and HCM human capital management departments such as human resources HR. Businesses and corporations looking to improve their financial planning process and improve their overall organizational strategy will find EPM software the most beneficial of the large number of business intelligence tools available on the market.
Pricing of enterprise performance management software can vary. The cost of an EPM solution is dependent on the size of the business whether you are a small business or at an enterprise-level. As it is with other types of software solutions, pricing is usually related to the number of functionalities, how many concurrent users are needed, and the overall size of the company itself.
EPM system vendors will warn about the dangers of selecting solutions based on purchase price alone. Like with most big purchases your company will make, simply picking the lowest priced option for a good or service can often lead to regret when that small amount of money saved does not outweigh the headaches and risks your company has been exposed to.
Choosing the lowest-cost option rather than the best long-term fit can lead to your business paying more to rectify the shortcomings of the low-cost option or the costs that may go with having to retrain employees, improve ease of use, or fix the messy implementation that your business felt it could handle on its own. The industry has not been able to agree on a specific term that encompasses everything these software solutions are capable of. Rather, they tend to use the name that best describes the need at hand i.
Some companies argue that EPM will split into a strategic category and an operational category, but until then, EPM software vendors will attempt to meet any and all needs an organization may have. Simply put, BI tools help provide the visualizations needed to make decisions, while EPM uses the data accumulated with BI and links that data to the critical goals of the organization.
BI tools can only go so far and typically have an end-point, while EPM solutions generally pick up where a BI tool has left off.
BI tools traditionally will collect data and present it in a manner that lets your staff and decision makers decipher it. It accomplishes this by creating a dashboard or a visualization of some sort that can make it easier for management to come to a realization. EPM options can help take the metrics that BI tools find and pair them with the vital goals of the company.
A renewed focus on financial performance. Some in the business community feel EPM software may have run its course. Managers and decision-makers alike understand the need for budgeting and forecasting software for better financial planning, and many wanted to fill this need by letting managers test what-if scenarios. EPM software was thought to be the best approach, given the ability to test these what-if scenarios. However, due to the time and cost investment for most EPM solutions, many companies may agree that the need for management methodologies and processes is second to that of improved financial performance, which can simply be provided with budgeting and BI tools that are far easier to implement.
EPM automates workflows with driver-based modeling for operations and scenario planning, reducing closing times from weeks to days. The integration of robotic process automation RPA has been a catalyst for growth in the enterprise performance management space. RPA helps automate time-consuming tasks such as data acquisition, reconciliation and verification.
EPM provide intuitive self-service features that help business users connect to multiple data sources in real time. Departments across the organization can pull in the specific information required on their own without IT help. As the scope of data ingestion expands across the organization, all teams can add value to the business with timely insights and decisions.
With data mining , statistics and ML-based algorithms, businesses can forecast future business trends and outcomes. Predictive and prescriptive analytics will continue to drive intelligent decision support and data-backed business strategies. Software vendors like Oracle, SAP and Infor provide the whole range of EPM functionality — planning and budgeting, consolidation and close, account reconciliation , tax reporting, data management and business reporting.
AI and ML-based systems feed off massive amounts of data, making a centralized data hub a necessary part of the integrated offering. The data hub provides advanced data integration, cleansing and preparation capabilities, and data enrichment.
Integrated EPM solutions are more cost-effective and easier to implement than point solutions — reasons why more enterprises are opting for them. Whether your company needs the above functionality depends on what you want out of EPM. For instance, augmented capabilities enhance productivity and boost efficiencies, but they add to the product cost. Enterprise performance management is going through an evolutionary change today, with cloud platforms and the many benefits they provide proving to be catalysts for growth.
Additionally, support for greater customization and more focused strategies on data integration are changing this market. What do you see happening in the enterprise performance management field? Let us know in the comments section below! I wanted to compliment you on such a well-written post. I am investigating EPM for a client and this post by far does a really good job of describing the technology, today and into the future.
Traditionally, this work was managed by finance, using manual processes and spreadsheets to track progress and alignment with corporate goals. Each line of business operated in a silo and finance teams were challenged to consolidate departmental objectives, budgets, and data into a single, cohesive strategy for the business. This was time-consuming work that often failed due to human error or the inability to comply with ever-changing regulatory and tax laws. Stale and inaccurate data introduced additional challenges, making it impossible to respond quickly to changes in the business — with underperforming results not coming to light until much later in the cycle.
Enterprise performance management systems came into use in the s. Hosted on premise, these systems automated reporting and financial consolidation processes. Many manual workflows were eliminated, resulting in significant efficiencies and consistency in reporting and regulatory compliance. In the intervening years, EPM systems migrated to the cloud, making the technology more accessible to organizations and departments that did not have the capability or the budget to support the infrastructure on premise.
Cloud-based EPM provided additional efficiencies, most importantly, access to real-time operational and financial data so that profitability and performance could be tracked in the moment.
Each business unit or department maintains the flexibility to manage its own plans but is part of an integrated view of financial and operational plans, creating a more collaborative approach to planning and performance management, as well as higher accuracy and agility. Enterprise performance management, or EPM, technology specializes in forecasting and financial management.
It provides analytics, reporting, and forecast modeling so organizations can analyze, understand, and plan strategically for the business.
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