Enterprise performance management (EPM) refers to an integrated management approach that links strategic goals directly to the operational and financial activities necessary to reach those goals.
From an application perspective, EPM encompasses a suite of solutions that are targeted at an organisation’s decision-makers, including those that coordinate the budgeting, reporting and consolidation activity. EPM solutions provide insight into budgets and seek information from the actuals in order to facilitate variance analysis through different reporting tools. In general, anEPM suite offers tools for effective budgeting, financial consolidation and reporting, profitability management, strategy management, and decision support. EPM solutions are an extension to Business Intelligence (BI) and leverage OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) technologies. The key differentiator between BI and EPM is that whilst BI may provide the analytics to assist an organisation in setting its goals and monitoring progress towards them, EPM goes further and leverages that information in order to guide the organisation to its goals.
Click here to read the full article in the December 2010 edition of Inside SAP.
