Enterprise performance management

Enterprise performance management (EPM) is a field of business performance management which considers the visibility of operations in a closed-loop model across all facets of the enterprise. Specific to financial activities in the office of the chief financial officer, EPM also supports financial planning and analysis (FP&A).

There are several domains in the EPM field which are driven by corporate initiatives, academic research, and commercial approaches. These include:

Based on the mission and vision of an organization, different strategic needs may drive how EPM domains are leveraged and promoted within an organization. For example, a professional services firm based in Canada may view the need to have effective and transparent supply chain operations very differently from a clothing manufacturer with operations throughout the world. What is common in the EPM approach is the closed-loop EPM process model advocated by Kaplan and Norton and their management approaches to strategy formulation, including balanced scorecard and strategy map techniques.

The four domains, or disciplines, referred to above exist to define and cover the six stages of the closed-loop EPM process model. The six stages of the closed-loop EPM process model are: strategy development, strategy translation, organization alignment, operations planning, learning and monitoring, and testing and adaptation.

Strategy formulation refers to activities of an organization which determine the direction of its agenda. This is generally constructed of the mission, vision, and strategic goals and objectives of an organization. Once the direction is established, an organization monitors its progress against those activities and takes corrective actions to reach a particular target state.

While execution is the key to any operational objective, the strategy formulation surrounding why execution should occur and the context by which execution should be performed is also important. In recent years, organizations embed formal approaches to risk management to address market opportunities that organizations pursue. In this way strategy is aligned, performance is predictable, and executives can make better business decisions.

Executives live in a financially driven environment, where operational processes are traditionally a means of organizing resources inside the company and its value chain and employees are the responsible actors to execute those processes. The strategy gap that some industry watchdogs have noted is real and growing. Innovative technologies provide one approach to collapsing this gap and allowing corporate strategic outcomes to be fully realized and risk management programs to be fully described.

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