Digging The Basics Of The Enterprise Performance Management

 

In this technology era, we are surrounded by some of the world class technology innovations and therefore, it is very common to assume that everyone around us is familiar with the various terms like – ERP, CRM and EPM. The BI (Business Intelligence) is the next thing. So, do you know about all these terms?

Sometimes it is quite good to take a back step and ask ourselves that how well we know each of the terms discussed above and how we will categorize our field of niche accordingly. Today, many of you might not be aware about the basics of the acronym EPM (Enterprise Performance Management). So, what this enterprise performance management is?

Let’s begin by first differentiating the Enterprise performance management from the BI (Business Intelligence). Today, many of the software application vendors, who have initially developed business intelligence solutions, are now trying hard to expand their work portfolio by extending their capabilities with Oracle enterprise performance management system and solutions. Now you might be thinking what this BI (Business Intelligence) is? Well, it just comprises of the various tools for analysis and reporting that help organizations in decision making.

Today, you can find a number tools in the market that serve the various requirements, starting from the most common multi-dimensional analysis via data mining to the sophisticated predictive analysis. Giant enterprises have created a huge data warehouse, which aggregate the information from the transactional systems and serve as the data source for the various Business Intelligence tools. However, such organizations with a rock solid BI framework often faltering when it comes to take the right decision. Here comes the EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)…!

EPM systems have built upon BI by getting benefits from the information provided by it. Even if we assume that we are having good data and can make great decisions, we are still lagging with the gap between the reports. So, what comes in between this empty gap? Well, it might be process & actions, which leads us to the first definition of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management system.

EPM is built upon BI (Business Intelligence). Once a BI framework is implemented, enterprises move towards automating the processes that can easily leverage the information provided by the business intelligence solutions. One of the most popular cases would be scorecarding solutions offered by many software application vendors. However, a few of the people realize scorecarding a whole that can be carried out by the BI tools. Well, this would be perfectly fine if your goal is only to report the status of the key performance indicators.

A real performance management applications should offer a lot more than this. Most importantly, they should be able to manage the portfolio of strategic or other performance improvement initiatives and projects.
Another way that you can think about EPM is in terms of the processes, such as financial planning, budgeting practices, forecasting and so on. Dealing with the financial performance of an organization is one of the most basic functions of Enterprise Performance management applications. But EPM could be applied to a broaden set of business verticals.

So, from the above discussion, we can say that EPM applications is an extension of the BI solutions. The BI and EPM solutions, both are used for the enhanced decision making & performance. Hope the above discussion will help you clear the fundamentals of EPM solutions. If you have any question or query, then you can comment below…!