Over the years I have seen that enterprise performance management (EPM) systems mainly collect data and present them to managers/ users.
First generation EPM systems
These systems go by many names – decision support systems, business intelligence, and management information systems. All do the same – report and analyze data. This is the first type (generation) of EPM systems and most vendors are offering this today.
Second generation EPM systems
The second category of EPM systems is those which, besides reporting and analyzing data, give you the option to include more “soft data.” Soft data can be initiatives, assessments, text, written plans etc. This is what most EPM vendors have problems with today. They cannot “tell the story.”
“This is what most EPM vendors have problems with today. They cannot ‘tell the story.’”
To test this, give the software vendor your strategy plan and ask how this can be expressed and followed up in their system. You will see big gaps when it comes to managing initiative capabilities and the verbal part of EPM systems.
Third generation EPM systems
The third category of EPM systems is those in which you have process support for your management processes. Here, you are interested in clarifying your management processes and automating the processes in the EPM system.
Some examples of processes that you would like to automate are below:
- Update on targets – make sure that all the people who are responsible for meeting targets are updating their status regularly. This can be done automatically (sending reminders, input forms, escalating if not performed).
- Create the management meeting agenda – the system can call for a management meeting, create the agenda for you – issues that you need to flag during the meeting or “rules that you set” that should be discussed. For example, you can say that all initiatives that are due should be on the agenda. Similarly, all the KPIs that are red or all risk factors with an impact of more that X millions and so on.
- Resource allocation – the system can assist in the process of resource allocation. It will send out emails and ask for approval.
- Update of prognosis – why should all prognoses be updated? Why not update only if needed? The system can assist you in doing exactly this, and only asks for prognosis updates where deviations are larger than x%.
Now, Corporater has created a separate module for achieving all this. It is called Corporater Workflow and it is helping our customers tremendously in automating their performance management processes. If you would like to know more about this module – please don’t hesitate to contact us.
