The Anatomy Of Modern Intelligent Enterprise Performance Management Systems…

Enterprise Performance Management — Take 2 — Prospering with Volatility In The Digital Economy

With increasingly disruptive market forces, specifically the advances in technology, it’s necessary to reframe current approaches in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

Back in the old days of running a business, it was enough to define a vision, state a competitive advantage, and commit plans to paper on a five-year basis. But no longer is this feasible.

In this modern operating environment, organizations need to reassert their competitive advantage. They need to be able to turn around disruptive chaos and trump the digital-first natives that now dominate our business arenas. But how?

Simply said but hard to action, Organizations need to gain new visibility and control. It’s all about getting good at managing perpetual transition and change. Not perfectly. Just better than the next guy.

The competitive trend for differentiated personalization, infinite choice, high quality at an attractive price, and continuous innovation experiences warrants a whole new way to think about Enterprise Performance Management in the experience economy.

It’s getting harder to manage the ambidextrous organization, and an imperative to become one. Luckily, the building blocks of Modern EPM are already coming into place to support this. Technology is providing timely new capabilities that underpin communication, collaboration, decision support, and feedback loops. This can be likened to EPM being enhanced through a modern data driven digital nervous system as a foundation for the Intelligent Enterprise organisations are building now.

Modern EPM drivers have necessarily seen a marked shift away from fixed time-based planning forecasting and budgeting cycles. We see a transition towards rolling and event-based budgets and forecasts, based around continually changing trends and evolving mission and initiatives. New incentives increasingly look beyond the profit motive to societal considerations. Zero budgeting is not always appropriate to support this new growth paradigm.

Effective scarce resource allocation is now a critical driver of competitive advantage while harvesting cash cow operations.

Consequently, budgeting and forecasting processes are made increasingly complex. As products shift to services that transition to consumer experiences, business models evolve — planning, Budgeting, and forecasting scarce resource allocation takes on a whole new management dimension.

But to fully exploit new practices in Budgeting, forecasting, and HR performance management, accurate real-time situational awareness needs to be employed. Situational awareness through rich context layering provides a highly granular and multi-dimensional through-time snapshot of actual business performance. This view lies beyond the “standards view” of generic BI.

It is necessary to augment event-based and rolling budget, forecasting, what-if scenario analysis, and workforce performance management with these new insights to improve allocation, targeting, and predictability.

The Situational Awareness engine of a modern EPM solution also provides extended opportunities for more comprehensive and diverse value capture. The use of Geospatial technology layered over curated transaction data allows connection to a “living atlas” of Location intelligence datasets. Enabling heightened magnitudes of value capture around customers, consumers, commercial, operations, supply chain, and distribution.

Integration of the IoT and Sensor data like SKU, Pallet, or vehicle tracking, will further enhance situational awareness to provide an even more complete lifecycle and experience context for timely enhanced decision support. But how does this all come together?

New world-class hybrid cloud-based enterprise software platforms provide the answer.

SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise Platform, is designed to support simultaneous optimization and innovation scenarios on an enterprise scale.

The modern EPM Platform comprises of three layers:
1. Business Capture — the business modeling and raw data ingestion layer
2. Knowledge Capture — where insight is generated,
3. Value Capture — where insight is actioned, leveraged, and shared for feedback loops planning, forecasting, and staff engagement scenarios

As a trusted source for downstream workflows and enterprise reporting, the EPM platform can be leveraged to provide general awareness on key business dimensions to a much broader audience with powerful visual analytics and interactive dashboards. But also be heightened through advanced predictive and prescriptive analysis, machine learning, and AI for further optimization and value creation.

As I said, digital transformation is not about being perfect but better than the next guy. Employing a Modern EPM solution to augment and automate business capabilities is that “better.”

Done right, producing direct cashable benefits and indirect tangible value, equating to .5pc of revenue onto the bottom line and new growth, with upwards of an x30 RoI is well within grasp.

Freeing up cash and capacity and building new competencies will ensure you can continue to compete and thrive.