Technology for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence (BI), and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) supports performance / process improvement initiatives to help organizations run more effectively.
This set of IT systems, applications, and tools allows organizations to improve planning and execution of initiatives by automating business processes, reconciling information about the state of its business, reporting results, and providing capabilities to forecast future scenarios; all within state-of-the-art integrated data models. For example, an organization might use SAP ERP to automate and manage its procure-to-pay processes as well as manage and reconcile its general ledger – reducing manual labor burdens and errors associated with performing transactions.
BI may be used to automate and improve reporting of valuable information contained in various IT systems. For example, a group of managers may want a report on Mondays containing all the previous week’s spending activity. They want the report in advance for a weekly review meeting held on Tuesdays. So, using BI reports, an automated report scheduled to run every Monday morning is generated and automatically distributed to those managers.
A good example of EPM is in the Office of the CFO, where leadership is responsible for tracking budget execution. Various systems may contain information relevant to communicating the results of programmatic spending. With EPM, users can pull information into a central repository and collect other data manually, then use built-in analytic capabilities to slice and dice and analyze the information to support decision making. This allows the CFO’s office to shift its focus from being a business’ “scorekeeper” and more towards being the business’ strategic advisor.