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Ron Dimon

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Beschreibung

A workable blueprint for developing and implementing performance management in order to improve revenue growth and profit margins Enterprise performance management (EPM) technology has been rapidly advancing, especially in the areas of predictive analysis and cloud-based solutions. Real Enterprise Performance Management introduces a framework for implementing and managing next-generation functionality for better insight, focus, and alignment of EPM. This blueprint shows that EPM can have a direct positive impact on revenue growth, operating margin, asset utilization, and cash cycle efficiency. * Introduces a framework for implementing and managing next-generation functionality for better insight, focus, and alignment * Reveals that EPM can have a strong impact on revenue growth, operating margin, asset utilization, cash cycle efficiency Today's businesses have a great deal of data and technology, but less-than-fact decisions are still made. Executives need a structured framework for gathering, analyzing, and debating the best ways to deploy capital, people and time. Real Enterprise Performance Management joins IT and finance in a digestible blueprint for developing and implementing performance management in order to improve revenue growth and profit margins.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Who should read this book?

Overview of the Content

So What?

Organic Growth and Outperformance Management

Note

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: What's Broken and What's Possible

Strategy-Execution Gap

Buckets of Pain

The Promise of EPM

What Enterprise/Corporate/Business Performance Management Is Not

“Business Intelligence with a Purpose”

Notes

Chapter 2: An Enterprise Performance Management Process

Context

Impact

Responsibility

Management Operating System

Macro and Micro

The Middle

Summary

Notes

Chapter 3: Gather: Turning Data into Information

Management by Exception

Your Point of View

Information Qualities

Information Delivery

Management and Statutory Reporting

Sustainability Reporting

Enabling Technologies

Rationalization

Potential Quick Wins

Summary

Notes

Chapter 4: Understand: Turning Insights into Actions

Business Questions

Patterns and New Insights

Big Data and Predictive Analytics

Data Visualization

Enabling Technologies

Components for Your EPM Roadmap

Potential Quick Wins

Summary

Notes

Chapter 5: Debate: Turning “What If” into “What's Next”

People

The Process

Scenarios

Resilience

Drivers: What Moves the Needle?

Debate Management

Enabling Technologies

Potential Quick Wins

Summary

Note

Chapter 6: Commit: Bringing Accountability and Focus to the Enterprise

Accountability

Gaming the System

Enterprise Planning and Forecasting

Enabling Technologies

Ingredients for Your EPM Roadmap

Potential Quick Wins

Summary

Notes

Chapter 7: Execute: From Insight to Actions to Results

Everything Is Connected

Sales Performance Management

Sales Operations Performance

Order to Cash Performance Management

Supply Chain Performance Management

Marketing Performance Management

Summary

Notes

Chapter 8: Strategy: Aligned to the Right Outcomes

The Language of Strategy

Functional Value Maps

Optics: Line of Sight

Metrics Equal Focus

Profitability

Strategic Flexibility

Closing the Gap

Summary

Notes

Chapter 9: Bringing It All Together

Alignment

A Common Business Language

Maturity Is in the Arrows

Return on Investment and Total Cost of Ownership

Standard Architecture

Your EPM Roadmap

Organizational Readiness: The EPM Center of Excellence

Paralyzed by Feuds?

EPM and Incentive Plans

How Do You Get Started?

Summary

Notes

Appendix: An EPM Maturity Model

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 9781118370759 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781118420669 (ebk)

ISBN 9781118434352 (ebk)

ISBN 9781118417133 (ebk)

For Harrison and Ruth -

Foreword

I have been involved with what is now called Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) in one way or another my entire career, whether it was in financial reporting and analysis or formulating strategy for our global business. I am a strong proponent of closing the gap between high-level strategy and day-to-day decisions, and of completing the cycle from a decision to its effectiveness. All too often we devise great plans and set out to execute them and then get overcome by events or sidetracked without coming back to see how relevant our plans were or how effective our decisions are.

Current economic demands and competitive pressure now require that we pay more attention to this cycle of Strategy, Plan, Execute, Analyze, and Improve. We must be more flexible and adaptable and be able to react to changing market conditions and customer preferences. And we must have a new level of accountability at all levels of our organizations. And with more mature and advanced EPM tools and the vast amounts of data at our disposal, there is no reason we should not be using this to give us more insight into the business and make faster, better decisions.

At Hyatt, we use our EPM capabilities to optimize all of our resources in pursuit of our goal of becoming the most preferred brand in each customer segment that we serve, not just for our guests but also for our managers, associates, and investors. The general managers at our full-service owned and managed hotels have an average tenure of more than 21 years at Hyatt. They are supported by regional management teams that use information, planning, analytics, and what-if modeling to support our general managers in achieving their goals. EPM is one of the foundational elements of our success and helps us focus on our mission of providing authentic hospitality.

EPM is not just another management fad or another technology buzzword. This is doing commonsense, fact-based management right. In this book, Ron Dimon shows us a way to think about EPM holistically and directly connects it to what's important in the business: sustainably delivering stakeholder value. The book provides a framework to hang your EPM roadmap onto, and helps you prioritize what's next on your journey to managing and improving performance. I wish you luck on that journey.

Gebhard Rainer, EVP and CFOHyatt Hotels CorporationChicago, ILNovember 2012

Preface

Thank you for buying this book. It was a lot harder to write than I thought. The main problem was removing content—there is so much to Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), it's not easy to make it be just about a few things.

The genesis of this book is my career: For over 30 years I have been involved in Finance Systems and Processes, from my first job at Deloitte, Haskins + Sells as a 19-year-old programmer writing the Journal Entry subsystem for a trial balance program (called ATOM: Audit Techniques On Microcomputers, originally written in dBase II), through Lotus 1-2-3, Accpac, then custom-developed systems (like BOX, the Broker of Obligations and Transactions that connected US Navy purchase cards with Citibank), to nine years at Hyperion Solutions (later acquired by Oracle) where I helped raise the EPM toddler (back then it was called BPM—Business Performance Management.)

However, as they say, I am standing on the shoulders of giants with the content of this book. My EPM epiphany came after watching so many Hyperion professionals whiteboard the RAMP cycle (Report, Analyze, Model, Plan)—which I initially thought was a great way to sell software—when I started noticing clients' visceral reaction to it: “Yes! That's how I want our business to be managed!” So I immersed myself in the EPM system and started noticing all of the untapped business value. Later, I got to take that whiteboard to a whole new level with senior business executives, mostly CEOs and CFOs of name-brand companies, when I worked with Simon Tucker at The Business Foundation. When we took out the technical jargon and talked only in management processes, business value and strategy-to-execution terms, they would experience a reaction similar to my Hyperion clients: “I don't care what you call it or what it costs, that's what I want!”

I'd like to think of this book as part sequel to Howard Dresner's first book The Performance Management Revolution: Business Results Through Insight and Action (John Wiley & Sons, 2007). I had a lot of fun working on that book with Howard and this book delves into some of his ideas in more detail and with less eloquence.

Who should read this book?

This book is for CFOs, CIOs, their direct reports, and any organizational visionary or aspiring leader who wants to “bring it all together” and create an actionable vision and plan for improving performance. The book is also intended for managers who want to understand EPM and how it can help them be better managers. My hope is that any student of EPM can learn and apply at least a few ideas from this book.

If you think of your business as a giant computer, and all of your resources including time, money, people, assets, products, and customers as the data files and software applications on that computer, then what is the operating system of your business? What is it that directs, guides, prioritizes, organizes, and optimizes your resources? I call this, simply, your management operating system.

Enterprise Performance Management Done Right is essentially about three things to help you improve your management operating system:

1. A Framework. This is the management operating system for your business and shows how all of the pieces of EPM work together as one holistic process. It is most useful as a long-term, high-level EPM vision.
2. Enabling Technologies. Within the framework, I show what pieces you need to put into place to deliver on the necessary EPM processes.
3. A Fresh EPM Roadmap. This is insight on how to prioritize all those potential EPM initiatives given your strategic business objectives, and how they are supported by enabling technologies, eventually being fulfilled on your aspirational EPM framework.

Overview of the Content

The book is organized into nine chapters.

Chapter 1: What's Broken and What's Possible. This chapter gives you an overview of the promise of EPM. It helps you understand what problems this domain was created to solve and how well it's been solving them.
Chapter 2: An Enterprise Performance Management Process. This is the central idea of the book and of the model for “real” EPM. It's a straightforward management process that is enabled by EPM processes and technology. It's a closed-loop “uber” process that helps guide your EPM roadmap and helps deliver on the promises of EPM.
Chapter 3: Gather: Turning Data into Information. One of the most common elements of EPM is management reporting. It helps answer the question “where are we and how are we doing” at a particular point in time. This chapter outlines how reporting has changed to be much more dynamic, how it has to deliver more insight than ever, and how it cannot live in isolation.
Chapter 4: Understand: Turning Insights into Actions. EPM decouples analytics from reporting to become its own discipline, not just in the hands of the few. This chapter addresses the “why.” Why did we get what we got? It explores approaches to understanding through business questions and includes the ideas behind “Big Data” and predictive analytics.
Chapter 5: Debate: Turning “What If” into “What's Next.” One of the most overlooked cornerstones of EPM, modeling “what if” scenarios, is the topic of this chapter. Enabling a robust, fact-based, open debate in the company helps it prepare for a variety of possible futures and helps it maximize the value of its assets and minimize risk.
Chapter 6: Commit: Bringing Accountability and Focus to the Enterprise. Enterprise planning is a topic many people confuse for EPM itself. While certainly a critical part of EPM, there's more to EPM than planning. This chapter describes some better practices and shows how planning should be connected to the other areas of the management operating system.
Chapter 7: Execute: From Insight to Action to Results. Chapter 7 is a collection of EPM use cases across a variety of business functions, including Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain, and Human Resources, and processes like order-to-cash. From this chapter you'll see how EPM can be applied to any area of the business . . . not just Finance.
Chapter 8: Strategy: Aligned to the Right Outcomes. EPM works when it's aligned with, and in support of an organization's strategic objectives. Chapter 8 covers several topics on aligning EPM to strategy including the ever-popular Profitability Management.
Chapter 9: Bringing It All Together. Chapter 9 is all about developing your next-generation EPM roadmap based on the concepts and practices discussed in this book. It helps you sell EPM internally, ties up a few loose ends, and addresses what it takes to become world class in EPM adoption.
Appendix: An EPM Maturity Model. As you progress in your journey to EPM sophistication, it's useful to be able to grade yourself on where you are and where you want to be. This EPM Maturity Model can be used to facilitate discussions on agreeing on your roadmap and prioritizing EPM initiatives.

So What?

Typically, EPM is thought of as solely a Finance or Information Technology initiative and can easily be put in the “operational efficiency through automation” bucket of benefits. Which is just a fancy way of saying a corporate cost-cutting program. However, in order for EPM to really matter in the business, it has to have a direct impact on more than just operating margins. Ideally, it should provide your department, business unit, and company with one or more competitive advantages in the areas of:

Customer acquisition and retention

Product innovation and profitability

People productivity

Supply-chain efficiency

Marketing effectiveness

Overall sustainable execution of strategy

It is no longer an IT-led area but rather a joint IT, Finance, and Business concern that impacts all of these performance areas.

Revenue Growth

One of the first areas of the business to look at for financial performance and competitive advantage is revenue growth. There are a variety of ways EPM can improve revenue growth, including:

Better focus on sales productivity through more relevant, expedient sales forecasting

Better sales velocity by focusing efforts on the best-selling products, bundles, and channels

Maximized revenue by modeling product, bundle, and channel price mixes

Operating Margin

Especially in a down economy, with the automatic reaction to cut costs, EPM can help ensure you cut the “right” costs and that the removal of those costs doesn't adversely impact profitable revenue or future market share. EPM can impact this area in many ways, for example:

Understanding customer and product profitability allows companies to focus on marketing and selling the products that give the best return

Quickly modeling NewCo scenarios in a pending acquisition and basing those models on historical data and actual constraints (by product, by geo, by customer segment, etc.) can give a more accurate picture of available synergies to set the expectations of the street

Cash Cycle

Accelerating your cash cycle gives you more confidence in working capital, better opportunities for investments, and improves overall efficiencies. EPM efforts can include:

Gathering and sharing information on Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), Days Payable Outstanding (DPO), and Days in Inventory (DII)—delivered to the right people in the organization (and tied to employee rewards)—can have a positive impact on cash cycle

Cash-Flow forecasting and Working Capital analysis can help improve the cost of capital, debt ratios, and can reduce risk

Asset Utilization

Ensuring that assets such as plants, production lines, or equipment, are being employed in profitable activities is the way of an efficient organization. A couple of ways that EPM can impact your return on assets include:

Modeling capacity to ensure you have the right equipment availability, manpower, and output or yield

Scheduled versus unscheduled repair analysis to show how effective your preventative maintenance programs are

Customer Satisfaction

Making sure customers are attracted to your company and products and then retained for maximum lifetime value is one of the goals of most organizations. EPM can help ensure that this happens by:

Showing if there's a correlation between customer satisfaction levels and customer support staffing

Analyzing customer satisfaction scores by product and product lifecycle over time, showing root causes for declines in product satisfaction

Tracking a plan to improve Net Promoter Score by department

Employee Engagement

With more awareness and accountability, employees at all levels of the organization can make decisions to improve both the top and bottom lines.

EPM helps show how what you're working on is related to overall targets. For example, an A/R clerk can see how the velocity of receivables under his or her control can impact DSO, working capital, and free cash flow

EPM encourages more sharing and collaboration of plans, analyses and results, and reduces the need to recreate the wheel every time

Organic Growth and Outperformance Management

Unfortunately, many people equate EPM with enterprise budgeting/planning applications coupled with a statutory and management reporting initiative—with a focus on compliance and control. The real goal of EPM is to have a material impact on business performance, to standardize on one management operating system across an organization—for better performance visibility, execution, accountability, and organizational flexibility. What if you had a stretch goal of using EPM not just for performance management, but for OUT-performance management?

How would we use EPM to outperform your competitors on both revenue growth and profitability over the long term?

There are many ways to do this:

1. Organic growth is key—an intelligent investment in organic growth may provide more value than growth through acquisition. EPM supports organic growth in many ways:
a. Profitability management with customer and market segmentation: spending more effort marketing and selling the most profitable product/service offerings to the right people at the right time at the right price (price modeling and analytics is a key component of this).
b. Model, plan for, measure, and manage cross-selling and up-selling efforts. Use analytics to understand which cross-selling and up-selling initiatives work and how they can be replicated. Tie this into the pricing models as well.
c. Look to adjacencies, for example, bundles with partner products/services (e.g., Nike + iPod). These can capture new markets and pull along sales of your products. Including external parties (suppliers, partners, resellers) in your rolling revenue forecasting process gives you more visibility into opportunities;
d. Market expansion: EPM includes multidimensional modeling of different scenarios that can be risk weighted, so, for example, if you want to expand to an emerging market, you can factor in risk from currency fluctuations, government regulations, and other assumptions. Once you have debated and selected the right model, you can use that as the basis for a capital expenditure plan, revenue and expense budget, and workforce plan.
2. Other areas for EPM to contribute to out-performance include supporting and interconnecting knowledge-intensive intangibles (intellectual property [IP], patents, copyrights, strong brands) to financial and operational key performance indicators (KPIs)—thus linking innovation to the entire business.

If you want a quick way to start using EPM to impact the top and bottom line, simply add a new category to your revenue forecast: from “worst-case,” “probable,” and “commit” to a “stretch” (upside) number, and start managing to that.

EPM, as it is currently practiced, is still largely a collection of silos. It's time to bring it all together, to interconnect the processes, to build on a common-rules and meta-data platform and to turn EPM into a sophisticated management operating system.

My hope is that you embrace the Management Operating System and use EPM to drive value for your people, your customers and vendors, your markets, and all of your stakeholders.

My hidden agenda is to help move the EPM industry forward through more sophisticated adoption and by showing more correlation to improving performance. At a minimum, that would include:

Making it a closed-loop process, not fragmented silos and initiatives

Encompassing all areas of the business including Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Development, not exclusive to Finance

Including Business Intelligence and Business Analytics, not just Enterprise Planning and Reporting

Using it as a platform for continuous improvement, better transparency, collaboration, and what author Daniel Pink says truly motivates us: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

1

Note

1 Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Press, 2009).

Acknowledgments

To my friend Simon Tucker from whom I have learned much and shared many adventures and laughs. Much of the content for this book was formed and validated while working with Simon on myriad clients.

Thanks to Gebhard Rainer for his foreword—I first heard Gebhard speak at a Hyperion event in 2004 and I realized just how much difference EPM can make in a business.

To those who encouraged and supported me in writing this book: Rick Cadman, Dawna MacLean, Nancy Belmont, Tony Mayo, and my advisory board and brain trust in Tony's Vitality, Service and Outstanding Performance (VSOP) executive coaching group. A special thanks to Tony for recommending Scrivener software, which doubled my productivity overnight.

To Howard Dresner and Frank Buytendijk, who made strategy fun.

To my early mentors from Deloitte in Toronto: John Gambles, P. Howard Lyons, Jim Youldon, and Denman Lawrenson.

To Alan Slaight for letting me work on his book on Stewart James (Stewart James in Print: The First Fifty Years [Jogestja, 1989]).

To friends and colleagues who reviewed the content, gave me feedback, and helped improve the overall quality of the book, especially Rich Fluck, Nina Acosta, Kim Flaherty, Toby Hatch, John O'Rourke, and again, Rick Cadman.

To Oracle Corporation and Tableau Software Inc. for their screenshots.

To my editors at John Wiley & Sons: Tim Burgard and Stacey Rivera, with much gratitude for their vision and their patience.

To countless colleagues at Deloitte, ITG, Hyperion, Infosys, and CheckPoint Consulting, and all those clients through 30 years of consulting that taught me their businesses and allowed me to contribute to their success.

And I want to acknowledge my family for their love, motivation, and joy. Especially my sister, Marlene, for reminding me who I am.

Ron DimonFairfax, VAApril 2013

Chapter 1

What's Broken and What's Possible

“Finding what's wrong and fixing it” versus “seeing what's possible and going for it” give two very different lives.

—Tony Mayo

We are in the middle of an information deluge and an insight glut.1

Our systems, processes, and information are still struggling to escape silos when the economy is crying out for collaboration, efficiency, and better results.

Folks are constantly reinventing the wheel at work and some lament “if only people in our company knew what everyone in our company knows!”2 Many companies can barely agree on the definition of a customer, an employee, or sales figures, let alone agree on how to improve them.

With all this technology and information at our fingertips, we are still making decisions in the dark and relying on our best guesses.

Certainly some organizations are doing better than others when it comes to closed-loop, fact-based decision-making, but the opportunity to take advantage of all this data we have is barely being exploited.

Strategy-Execution Gap

What is it that thwarts a rigorous process of sustainably executing an organization's strategy? As shown in Figure 1.1, some of the barriers include those capabilities that are the responsibility of managers and leaders in the organization.

Figure 1.1 Barriers in the Strategy-Execution Gap

In March 2010, Harvard Business Review (HBR) surveyed 1,075 HBR readers about strategy and execution in their organizations.3 Only 37% said their companies are “very good” or “excellent” at execution.

The HBR survey found that the top barriers to strategy-execution were:

Making the strategy meaningful to front-liners

Poor communication of strategy

Lack of accountability

Lack of clear and decisive leadership

Too much focus on short-term results

Everyone is too busy/not enough resources

Resistance to change

Strategy goals remain vague and pointless:

Leadership actions are inconsistent with strategy

Inability to measure impact

Business units with competing agendas

Too much uncertainty

In my consulting work, and being an employee for small, medium, and large organizations, I've seen some of the barriers to effective strategy execution including the following:

No vetting of the strategy to see if it's actually doable (do we have the right capital, right products, right markets, right people?), and little debate to refine the strategy.

Low agreement on what the strategy actually is—even among the C-suite executives (it's always a surprise to see this).

Low connection between the corporate financial and operational business models (made in the vetting debate) and budgets, plans, and forecasts.

Low buy-in to the budgets, plans, and forecasts (usually due to management overrides after a bottoms-up exercise), resulting in low buy-in to the strategy from lower levels in the organization.

Low agreement on what the right measures are to see how well we're doing, and no visible connection between those measures and strategic objectives.

Low belief that the numbers seen are accurate (or at least the same version), as well as a lot of manual effort to get at the numbers.

Low understanding of the root causes as to why the company achieves, underachieves, or overachieves results.

Little connection between root-cause analysis and tweaking the strategy (“hey, we are losing money on product X, and it's not a loss-leader, should we be in that business?”).

Low accountability for results. Some organizations don't have targets or owners for their key objectives.

When it does work, I've seen things like accounts receivable associates having a Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard that shows how they have a daily impact on days sales outstanding and cash collections which directly impacts strategic objectives like profitable revenue growth.

According to Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his article “The Execution Trap,”4 as operational and front-line employees have to make decisions every day involving customers and operations, they become de facto strategists. Or, in my view, at least de facto strategy executioners, and I don't mean they have to kill the strategy!

Imagine if your number-one strategic objective is “profitable revenue growth,” and the target is 10% year-over-year improvement in both revenue and operating margin. Also imagine that every employee knows this—they even have it written on a laminated card they carry around in their wallets and purses. And then one of your customer service reps gets a phone call from an irate customer. Typically, the customer service rep is measured on customer satisfaction including low call time, low time-to-resolution, high-marks on the net promoter score scale for each interaction, and so on. But what if the phone call from the irate customer was accompanied by a dashboard that automatically popped up on the customer service rep's screen that showed:

Customer lifetime value (CLV) (how much the customers company had spent on your products and services) was 50% lower than the average CLV.

Cost to serve (the amount spent on support, maintenance, returns, and so on) was 50% higher than the average cost to serve.

Overall customer profitability was ranked in the bottom 10% (this customer was very good at negotiating deep discounts on prices during the end-of-quarter sales cycle).

What would your customer service rep do? Would you want them to treat the irate customer as any other customer and invest the time and money to solve their problem or concern? Or would you want the customer service rep to forward the customer call on to a special help desk that, in line with your number one strategic objective, would “fire” this customer?

We need a better management process because business-as-usual is over. In its place we have a faster-paced, rapidly changing world, including:

A need to be more agile, more responsive, and more tolerant of uncertainty

Better-informed customers

Changing market and business models

Structural changes in the economics of business

Regulatory revolution

Growth through acquisition as the normal course of business

Redefining asset values

Changing delivery channels

Vast new information sources

Compressed cycle times

And those compressed cycle times impact the entire business:

Time to market for new products and services (concept to realization)

Time to deliver to the customer

Time to close the books

Time to hire new staff

Time to deploy new staff (on-boarding)

Time for new staff to reach full productivity

Time to make key decisions

Time to complete major business transactions

Time to obsolescence for equipment and products

Time to integrate acquisitions

Time to respond to competitive actions

Time to return on investment (ROI) (especially for new technology investments)

Time to enter a new market

5

EPM was designed to fill this 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.

Buckets of Pain

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:

More time is spent on assembling the numbers than on analyzing them—all this manual effort makes us inefficient and not very scalable.

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.

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).

There is little alignment across functions (Sales, Marketing, Development, HR).

People aren't following the prescribed processes, especially for submitting their plans and forecasts—they make different assumptions and interpret what we want differently.

The right people don't have access to the right information, at the right time.

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.