Naturally, financial reporting and forecasting analytic solutions will have weaknesses. For one, they are still limited to only the data within general ledgers. Optimizing financial management processes is only a first step on the road to their better alignment with other organizational business processes. Hence, various enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions enable organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise-wide performance, and they leverage the information that is stored in an array of corporate databases/data-warehouses, legacy systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM) or customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Once limited to the finance department of large companies, BI/analytics has expanded across departments and now even addresses the needs of customers, suppliers, and partners outside of the firm, given that if BI can help any department understand and serve customers better, that should in turn lead to better financial results. Companies have become adept at storing huge quantities of data on customers, products, and employees. However, this valuable data is often wasted, because it is analyzed in pockets, thus preventing valuable insight throughout the enterprise and beyond. To that end, nowadays, popular uses of BI include management dashboards and scorecards, collaborative applications, workflow, analytics, enterprise reporting, financial reporting, and both customer and partner extranets, to name some. These solutions enable companies to, for example, gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, reduce costs, detect patterns, optimize the supply chain, analyze project/product portfolio, increase productivity, and improve financial performance.
The latest evolutionary step introduces the concept of corporate performance management (CPM), which is often interchangeably referred to as enterprise performance management (EPM) or business performance management (BPM), and is an emerging portfolio of applications and methodologies with business intelligence (BI) architectures and technologies at its core. Historically, BI applications have focused on measuring sales, profit, quality, costs, and many other indicators within an enterprise, but CPM goes well beyond these by introducing the concepts of management and feedback, i.e., by embracing processes such as planning and forecasting as core tenets of a business strategy.
CPM also crosses traditional department boundaries (i.e., silos) to manage the full life cycle of business decision-making, combining business strategy alignment with business planning, forecasting, and modeling capabilities. In other words, it would entail mapping a structured set of data against predefined reports, alerts, dashboards, analysis tools, key performance indicators (KPIs), etc., to monitor and improve business processes based on the upfront established corporate strategic objectives. Further, CPM creates a closed-loop process, starting with developing high-level corporate goals and subsequent predefined KPIs, through measuring actual results against the KPIs and representing this comparison in a scorecard, with the results reported to management through intuitive reporting tools, and ultimately feeding these results back into the business modeling process for corrections in the next planning cycle.
CPM leverages the performance methodologies such as the balanced scorecard or activity-based costing (ABC), and although these approaches help determine how and what to measure, they lack a mechanism for dynamically changing values to keep abreast of the business reality. Ensuring the closed-loop management is CPM's enhancement of BI applications, which traditionally focus on measurement, which is basically worthless without the ability to act on it. Consequently, a perplexing variety of existing tools and techniques can lay claim to being part of the CPM trend—ranging from business intelligence tools and analytics (e.g., packaged data-marts; data mining tools; extract, transform and load [ETL] tools; and dashboards or executive information system [EIS]) to BPM applications and scorecard products.
Thus, CPM is the evolutionary combination of technology and philosophy, building on the foundation of technology and applications that many enterprises will have likely already implemented. The demand for these applications lies in the fact that they incrementally add value to already installed business applications, even the legacy ones, to a degree that the enterprises may finally see some long belated benefits and feel somewhat better about implementing cumbersome ERP systems. Indeed, many enterprises have already deployed some BI products too, such as querying and reporting tools, planning and budgeting applications, analytic applications, incentive management systems, portals, and scorecards, along with data warehouse technology, data models, and integration software, and what not. Anyone attempting to conduct the technology inventory stocktaking will likely find some CPM components already in use.
Once limited to the finance department of large companies, BI/analytics has expanded across departments and now even addresses the needs of customers, suppliers, and partners outside of the firm, given that if BI can help any department understand and serve customers better, that should in turn lead to better financial results. Companies have become adept at storing huge quantities of data on customers, products, and employees. However, this valuable data is often wasted, because it is analyzed in pockets, thus preventing valuable insight throughout the enterprise and beyond. To that end, nowadays, popular uses of BI include management dashboards and scorecards, collaborative applications, workflow, analytics, enterprise reporting, financial reporting, and both customer and partner extranets, to name some. These solutions enable companies to, for example, gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, reduce costs, detect patterns, optimize the supply chain, analyze project/product portfolio, increase productivity, and improve financial performance.
The latest evolutionary step introduces the concept of corporate performance management (CPM), which is often interchangeably referred to as enterprise performance management (EPM) or business performance management (BPM), and is an emerging portfolio of applications and methodologies with business intelligence (BI) architectures and technologies at its core. Historically, BI applications have focused on measuring sales, profit, quality, costs, and many other indicators within an enterprise, but CPM goes well beyond these by introducing the concepts of management and feedback, i.e., by embracing processes such as planning and forecasting as core tenets of a business strategy.
CPM also crosses traditional department boundaries (i.e., silos) to manage the full life cycle of business decision-making, combining business strategy alignment with business planning, forecasting, and modeling capabilities. In other words, it would entail mapping a structured set of data against predefined reports, alerts, dashboards, analysis tools, key performance indicators (KPIs), etc., to monitor and improve business processes based on the upfront established corporate strategic objectives. Further, CPM creates a closed-loop process, starting with developing high-level corporate goals and subsequent predefined KPIs, through measuring actual results against the KPIs and representing this comparison in a scorecard, with the results reported to management through intuitive reporting tools, and ultimately feeding these results back into the business modeling process for corrections in the next planning cycle.
CPM leverages the performance methodologies such as the balanced scorecard or activity-based costing (ABC), and although these approaches help determine how and what to measure, they lack a mechanism for dynamically changing values to keep abreast of the business reality. Ensuring the closed-loop management is CPM's enhancement of BI applications, which traditionally focus on measurement, which is basically worthless without the ability to act on it. Consequently, a perplexing variety of existing tools and techniques can lay claim to being part of the CPM trend—ranging from business intelligence tools and analytics (e.g., packaged data-marts; data mining tools; extract, transform and load [ETL] tools; and dashboards or executive information system [EIS]) to BPM applications and scorecard products.
Thus, CPM is the evolutionary combination of technology and philosophy, building on the foundation of technology and applications that many enterprises will have likely already implemented. The demand for these applications lies in the fact that they incrementally add value to already installed business applications, even the legacy ones, to a degree that the enterprises may finally see some long belated benefits and feel somewhat better about implementing cumbersome ERP systems. Indeed, many enterprises have already deployed some BI products too, such as querying and reporting tools, planning and budgeting applications, analytic applications, incentive management systems, portals, and scorecards, along with data warehouse technology, data models, and integration software, and what not. Anyone attempting to conduct the technology inventory stocktaking will likely find some CPM components already in use.
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