Top 4 Reasons How Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Improves Company Performance

Posted on by Bill Day

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) processes have traditionally been fulfilled with manual spreadsheets files and long hours devoted to ensuring the accuracy and reliability of key financial data. This process is at the core of decision-making that finance executives need to better guide their organizations. Having a well-designed and process aligned EPM platform can take the unnecessary burden off of finance staff team members and put the focus where organizations need it most, on critical analysis and decision-making.

EPM usually ends up being the last of the processes to optimize when trying to achieve a world-class, finance-driven organization. Historically ERP processes and platforms usually take priority when an organization is going through a finance transformation and upgrading their systems for the modern business era. During these types of initiatives your organization’s EPM needs should also be a key consideration.

ERP + EPM = Performance, profitability and growth

Organizations account for day-to-day financial performance in an ERP system. Extending your ERP platform with a well-designed EPM solution offers your organization better end-to-end efficiencies across the entire finance team along by streamlining manual tasks and providing faster response times to key decision makers. By enabling key elements of your finance process with an EPM solution, you simply automate, integrate and create reliability in a repeatable way and drive strategic growth, predictability, and accountability. When an EPM solution is paired with an ERP system, it is supercharged with the ability to centralize data, enabling the organization to gain new and deeper insights into its current performance and, if needed, adjust accordingly.

In fact, Oracle — which offers solutions in both spaces — has been moving toward grouping ERP and EPM together as ERP/M. The company has provided the following examples of how these tools might interconnect in practice:

  • An SMB sets up an ERP cloud to consolidate its most important workflows, for instance, finance, sales and logistics.
  • As transaction processing becomes more high-volume, the ERP system struggles to keep up with the growing complexity with reporting, budgeting, and forecasting.
  • Enter EPM. Oracle EPM helps (1) automate the close, (2) centralize budgeting and forecasting, and (3) provide better insight through delivered or self-service ad-hoc financial reporting so that the SMB type organization can set itself up better for growth.

Unfortunately, EPM is often an afterthought, despite these tangible benefits. Companies may see EPM as too niche, or fear that its implementation may be overly disruptive, complex and expensive. But fear not! None of that must be the case with Oracle EPM Cloud, especially now with the availability of two versions, Standard and Enterprise, and a new pricing structure that makes EPM capabilities more affordable to businesses.

Let’s look at four major reasons why EPM solutions are vital to sustained growth:

1. Improved focus on cost & profitability

As your organization grows, profitability must be a top priority. But focusing on it requires having granular insights into your overall operational cost and having line of sight to forecasting sales and revenues, which ERP applications alone and manual spreadsheets can’t always deliver.

EPM gives you visibility across all your lines of business, along with the cost and profitability performance of each either independently or combined. This functionality can be used to formulate integrated, agile forecasts that will help you respond to economic changes in the marketplace while sustaining your business in the long term.


 

2. Simplified analysis and financial reporting

Too often, organizations must rely on more than one system in order to meet their complex reporting requirements. Moreover, ongoing changes with Domestic and International GAAP reporting standards and statutory compliance means that processes that may have once sufficed are now outdated. The Oracle EPM platform has the agility organizations need to adapt and efficiently meet these new reporting requirements.

3. Enhanced Enterprise Data Management and governance

Companies are generating more information than ever before and changing how they want to organize and analyze the way they see their business. Handling these changes is more straightforward with the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) solution provided with the Oracle EPM Cloud platform. Governing changes with your financial platform can create unnecessary confusion with those who are approving and setting up new accounts, creating alternate views of the business or managing multiple financial models all at once. By deploying the Oracle EPM Cloud Enterprise Data Management solution, it is easy to centralize, govern and deploy the way businesses are using financial and master data across their organization.

4. Centralizing finance processes for a self-service end-user experience

Today many organizations currently administer their period ending close process as well as their budgeting and forecasting with the corporate finance teams taking the lead with setup, oversight and execution. By integrating your ERP and EPM platforms, you can set up the aforementioned processes centrally and begin deploying end-users to perform their own tasks. Integrating and extending your ERP with EPM capabilities allows you to shift the burden elements of the corporate finance team to users now being involved and accountable at the cost center or business unit level.

How to get started with EPM

We have only scratched the surface of what’s possible with EPM. Growing businesses that have already invested in an ERP solution should consider enabling an EPM cloud solution to alleviate the spreadsheet chaos with finance processes in a growing business. Contact the Inspirage team, who has deep experience in implementing Oracle solutions for organizations across all industries of all sizes, to learn more about how extending your ERP system with an EPM cloud platform can streamline and optimize your finance organization.

Bill Day | Key Contributor

Bill is a Hyperion Functional Advisor and Business Process Consultant. His skills and experience make him qualified to help customers with Business Process Improvement, Project Management, ERP, Advisory, HFM, FCCS and PBCS Design and Implementation. His experience spans over 25 years of business, technology, and project implementations with Oracle products centered on Hyperion Financial Management, FCC, Hyperion Planning, PBC, Hyperion Essbase, and Hyperion FDMEE spanning several industries. Bill has international accounting experience, including starting up companies in China, Brazil, France and Saudi Arabia. His experience as CFO and International Controller combined with his technical ability allow him to quickly understand the functional business setting and to develop solutions using enabling technology. Bill can fill the gap between Accounting/Financial personnel and technical IT and Programming resources.