Enterprise Performance Management
July 27, 2015 Leave a comment
I was asked to elaborate on my last post to include which Oracle technologies address which part of the enterprise planning ecosystem, so here you are! Please note, there are many ways to implement planning using Oracle tools, these are some of the most widely used.
July 17, 2015 1 Comment
I was asked to show how all of the part of an organization’s budgeting, planning and forecasting come together and support each other, and how the organization can get more sophisticated at forecasting. This diagram helped explain the overall flow as well as some of the elements you would want to put on a roadmap.
This should be a good starting place to have a debate about using the right planning and forecasting for better insight into the business, better resource deployment, and better profitability decision-making.
September 11, 2014 Leave a comment
An important distinction to keep in mind while designing and building your management operating system is the classification of information and reports in the Gather process.
Classifying helps you assign the right process, tools, data, and resources to information, reports, and the Gather process. Without an overt classification, you can end up delivering information inefficiently, or worse, incorrectly.
Here are some common classifications:
A Management Operating System
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)
September 4, 2014 Leave a comment
Data Consumption Is Undergoing a Major Shift
The most common process in the management cycle is Gather. Organizations spend an incredible amount of time gathering data and trying to turn it into meaningful reports, dashboards, scorecards, and spreadsheets. In other words, turning numbers into knowledge.
The purpose of all this activity is to find out where you are performing well and where you need to make some changes. However, with the plethora of data we’re getting, and with the speed at which change happens and transactions occur, it’s getting harder to find out exactly where you stand. How, when, where, and why we consume data is undergoing a major shift.
To turn raw data into useful information that you interact with, you need at least the following ingredients:
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)
August 28, 2014 2 Comments
I would like to introduce a framework for thinking about Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence. The genesis of this framework came from my days working at Hyperion Solutions (later acquired by Oracle Corp.). It’s been called a management “operating system” for your company because, like the operating system of your computer, it helps govern input and output and manage what applications (or decisions) are being run and helps make the most effective use of resources (memory, disk space, CPU cycles). You can start anywhere on this closed-loop process to tell the management operating system story, and today I’ll share Gather – the most common part of the cycle, with you.
A Management Operating System
Gather – While you are busy running your business (Execution, which means service customers, making products, selling in markets), you are generating lots of data. You gather that data and transform it into useful information (according to its context) and deliver it to the right people (according to impact and areas of responsibility).
This is the place where managers consume reports about the results of the business. It’s where they answer the question “where are we, right now?” Depending on your industry and your business, there are generally two kinds of reports: mostly financial and mostly operational. The trend has been to combine financial and operational information on one report, which is a good idea since the two are interrelated: financial investments help drive operational results, and effective operations help contribute to financial performance.
Reports are delivered in a variety of formats with a variety of tools and can be categorized as:
Reports give their readers a snapshot of what results have been produced to date to help them gauge how close to their goals and targets they are.
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)
August 21, 2014 Leave a comment
EPM was designed to fill the strategy to execution gap. It’s the new approach to management that makes strategy everyone’s job, that gives them the tools and processes to execute based on focus, alignment, and accountability. Let’s discuss three of the five benefits of EPM that I share in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO):
Differences between “Run the Business” and “Manage the Business”
EPM enables standard management processes that every company must do well: Budgeting, planning and forecasting Financial consolidation and statutory reporting Management reporting and business intelligence Profitability analysis, and Other financial and operational modeling, planning, analysis, and reporting EPM leverages the investment you have already made in Enterprise Resource Management, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Sales Force Automation, and other transactional systems.
EPM can help close the loop between what you want to happen in the business (and how), and what actually happened (and why): Records and documents business model assumptions, constraints, and drivers Connects those models into your annual operating plans, budgets, and forecasts Monitors and alerts exceptional variances from actual to plan Helps you understand the root causes of variance and plug that corporate knowledge Ties it all together with a common business language and common master data to improve visibility, focus, and alignment Giving more stakeholder alignment .
EPM can have a material impact on the top and bottom line, on the balance sheet, and on overall return on capital: It can improve visibility into the key drivers of value in the business. It can show the cause and effect relationship of operational metrics on financial performance. It helps you focus on the right things in the business. It can bring agility to business models and organizational structures. Giving better business decisions that are based on more timely information
You can learn more about EPM and how it can help your organization build a common business process to execute it’s strategy in my book Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization (Wiley CIO)
August 14, 2014 Leave a comment
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:
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)
February 27, 2014 Leave a comment
A modern management system that promotes fact-based decision making, accountability, transparency, and turns your data into a competitive advantage is supported by the four cornerstones of Enterprise Performance Management – brought together by a robust governance framework, process and set of tools. This is EPM:
January 14, 2014 1 Comment
I had a great chat with @toby_hatch of Oracle on why organizations spend more time arguing about where they got their numbers than what actions to take based on their results.
Here’s Toby’s blog entry.And here’s the interview.
October 8, 2013 1 Comment
Here’s an interview about my book by the Oracle Application Users Group, OAUG from Oracle OpenWorld 2013. Hosted by Lee Kantor and Stone Payton of BusinessRadioX:
This was a lot of fun to do and we hit on the business value of EPM and some hot topics like Data Relationship Management and Governance, how to get started in EPM, and how to ‘bring it all together.’ As we discuss, EPM is not just for CFO and CIO anymore, this interview appeals to any business manager and leader who is responsible for helping execute on company strategic objectives.
Ron Dimon 