It's all about Enterprise Performance Management

All the time people asking me (I believe it happens the same for all EPM consultants out there also)

• “What are you doing?”
• “EPM Consultant.” I answer
• “So you are consultant. But you consult what? It is building construction? Is it network or infrastructure?…”
• “No, it’s EPM. EPM stands for Enterprise Performance Management is an information system that help enterprises manage its performance…..” (this is going to be complicated)
• “Is it all about talking, talking and talking? Is it no coding at all?”….Those kinds of questions
• “No, I’m implementation consultant. I have to do a lot of things….blah blah blah”

It’s really not easy to explain this question at all: What I’m doing or what we, EPM consultant, doing? It even took me for years to fully understand what I’m doing. So I don’t expect a job title or a short job description can answer the question. This entry will do.

Another reason is that I believe it’s very important to fully understand what we are doing. If it’s not for doing our job better, at least it will motivate us to do things more proper.  As I tried to search on the internet to find a completed definition for my job but could not found any satisfied result. So l define it myself based on my own experience and all the collective knowledge for the last 5 years working in this industry. Hope it’s worth to share.

I don’t expect everyone will understand this explaination. But since this EPM consultant is an intersection of IT (Information System), Finance and Management, I expect at least those in IT, finance and management will understand or gain some perspectives from this post.

Let break it down to 3 questions?

• What is EPM?
• What is EPM system?
• What is EPM implementation Consultant?

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What is EPM?

EPM stands for Enterprise Performance Management is a set of management and analytic processes that enables the management of an organization’s performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals (wiki)

You can simply understand it as a subset of management activities in any company/enterprise/organization that mainly focus on or driven by performance of that organization.

Basically, it include 4 activities as a management cycle (as described by the Exhibit below)

1. Vision & Strategy
2. Goals & Objectives
3. Execution
4. Evaluation

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What is EPM system?

From users (finance, management) perspective, an EPM system is an information system or anything related to IT (information technology) that support for the management cycle above by modeling Vision & Strategy to Goals & Objectives, specify all the Goals & Objectives to detail Planning and Budgeting for Execution, support all kind of Reporting & Analysis to track the actual performance for Evaluation as well as monitoring and provide perspectives for enterprise to improve the whole cycle again and again…

An EPM system will help enterprise to Centralize, Unify, Standardize, Synchronize and Automate all the data, processes… related to EPM activities above

Compare to ERP system, ERP system is a system helps organization run their business by standardizing and automating high volume, transactional business processes across an organization. But they do little or nothing to help them manage their business. So you can think of ERP is a based system for running business, EPM is a system running above ERP that’s for manage business effectively. So it’s clear that most of organization implement ERP first then later implement EPM.

For more detail understanding about EPM and EPM system, I highly recommend you read the book “The performance Management Revolution: Business Results through Insight and Action” by “Howard Dresner”. Most of ideas of this post you can also find in this book.

From technical perspective, an EPM system such as Oracle EPM is an enterprise software that provides a platform (framework, product, tool…) specified for EPM purpose. Implementation consulting firm will base on that platform to configure, develop specific system that suits with specific company/enterprise/organization.

Similar to ERP system, but while ERP system is a set of a lot packaged products that already had completely all the functionalities required for business activities. The implementation firm need only to configure the parameters and do  customization on the products for the system to be suited with specific organization. EPM system, on the other hand, is usually developed from a scratch based on the provided platform. So usually EPM system will get higher requirement compliance than an ERP system.

An EPM system may be provided by any provider such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, Anaplan… See the full list of vendors here

(As mainly working on Oracle EPM, an typical EPM system and #1 in the market, I will choose it for the explanation)

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The next post I will continue with the question: What is EPM implementation Consultant? Or What he actually does? Is there any coding or just talking? What should be the main goals for EPM consultant? What a typical EPM project look like? Why consultant but not developer or anything else?