In the just concluded SAPPHIRE event in Vienna, we asked a jam packed audience joining us in the Enterprise Performance Management(EPM) session if they understand 'what is EPM' and only six of them responded positively. Therefore we plan to introduce and educate you, through this and a series of blogs, on this subject, and also invite readers to ask questions/post comments about EPM, SAP offerings in EPM and other connected topics.
What are EPM solutions?
These are a set of solutions targeted at decision makers in an organization who can leverage these solutions for effective budgeting, reporting, and decision support. EPM solutions consist of budgeting and planning, financial consolidation and reporting, profitability management, and strategy management. The solutions offer an integrated set of functions that help corporations set goals and strategies, create detailed plans, monitor consolidated actuals against plans, analyse profitability based on products, customers, channels or other segments,perform re-forecast and make accurate decisions.Who uses EPM solutions?
The solutions are more focussed towards the CFO and the finance department of any organization, who coordinate the budgeting and consolidation activity. However the solutions are rolled out to other C-Users /managers of other functions as well, in order for the decision makers to provide information into budgets as well as seek information from the actuals and reports.What's the technology?
EPM solutions run on OLAP technologies and could be treated as an extension to business intelligence..What's SAP doing in the EPM solution space?
SAP is coming out with niche solutions.The following are some of the recent announcements of SAP's offerings:Budgeting, planning, and financial consolidation solutions through SAP acquisition of Outlooksoft (M...Integrated solutions for CFO (April 23,2007) Profitability management solutions (April 23,2007) Strategy management solutions (Feb 20,2007)So as you see, SAP is very serious about the EPM space and are bringing out solutions that complement to their already available offerings such as ERP Financials and Goverance Risk and Compliance solutions.
Watch out for more blogs on EPM solutions
1. How is EPM solutions better than using spreadsheets
2. Why solutions that offer in built integration with ERP and GRC better
3. Empowering the business user to administer the solutions
and more……………..
