Top 7 Signs Your Organization Needs Enterprise Performance Management

In working with my clients across a wide spectrum of business sizes, industries, and geographies, when it comes to EPM, there are some “buckets” of pain I have found common to them all. Here are 7 reasons your organization needs EPM:

1. More time is spent on assembling the numbers than on analyzing them— all this manual effort makes us inefficient and not very scalable.
2. People show up to meetings with “their” numbers, and we don’t know how they got those numbers—there is not a lot of confidence.
3. Some people aren’t getting the reports or analyses we’re sending out— it either gets lost in their email or the right people aren’t on the distribution list (or they’re ignoring it).
4. There is little alignment across functions (Sales, Marketing, Development, HR).
5. People aren’t following the prescribed processes, especially for submitting their plans and forecasts—they make different assumptions and interpret what we want differently.
6. The right people don’t have access
7. Sometimes the data is just plain wrong— it doesn’t include the latest numbers or it’s an old version, or it’s missing parts.

You can learn more about EPM and how it can help your organization build a common business process to execute its strategy in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO)