Plan for Your Future Growth with EPM Solutions

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions should be driving your business growth. In this two-part series, we will explore how to harness the power of EPM applications. 

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) refers to the software that helps you analyze and report on your enterprise or business, and the process that is designed to help organizations plan and report on business performance. EPM solutions are primarily used to improve and automate planning, budgeting and reporting, often related to finance. With EPM, a business’s financial team is empowered with new tools and best practices to align with the organization’s objectives and technical needs.

In other words, it is a vital part of managing the day-to-day operations and future financial growth of a company. Many are now using tools like Oracle EPM to help them create solutions through the cloud to improve efficiency and cut costs. While many are companies are adopting these tools, numerous businesses are not yet to take make the switch and take advantage of them. They are hesitant to transition their outdated legacy tools and processes to Oracle due to the upfront cost and the undertaking that is involved. Also, some see it as a technical change unrelated to the business component of operations. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. When leveraged to its fullest capacity, new EPM tools in the cloud can help improve current processes, while accurately providing timely visibility into the organization’s numbers. In turn, this allows companies to make better business decisions that can drive higher monetary profits.

Maximizing Business Applications with EPM

Cloud-based business applications have come a long way in recent years. Corporations may not believe that using older tools is holding them back. However, these programs are not contributing to their growth at the same rate as enhanced solutions could be. Oracle EPM provides a whole suite of applications within one integrated platform, including:

• Oracle Planning & Budget Cloud Service (PBCS). Assists decision makers across all lines of an organization to model, plan and report using the Oracle Cloud infrastructure.
• Oracle Financial Consolidation & Close Cloud (FCCS). Efficiently manages and improves your consolidation and close processes, i.e., compiling data across business lines to analyze and make decisions.
• Oracle Hyperion Roadmap and Implementation. Introduces teams to the Hyperion implementation for rapid and centralized planning, budgeting, and forecasting, with an expert Apps Associates team to help with management.

These solutions are designed to upgrade the tools a company uses for activities such as budgeting, reporting, account reconciliation, tax management, cost reporting and so on. By housing these processes in the cloud, you can automate and streamline various time-consuming and mundane tasks, while extracting further value out of the available data. The Oracle EPM platform allows visibility into all areas of your business while combining and managing all streams of data. With additional information, greater report accuracy and increased efficiency overall, business goals can be built on precise information and supported by powerful systems.

When choosing any of these EPM applications, Apps Associates not only offers integration implementation but also offers continued support and advisory services. On the support side, Apps Associates provides administrative services for Oracle Cloud and Hyperion, such as: troubleshooting, periodic health checks, system monitoring and maintenance, and mentoring to help your team apply best practices. Expert support is also available 24/7, all to help you uphold the organization’s financial environment by enhancing the reliability of applications and improving team productivity. As your strategic partner, Apps Associates will work with you to develop a comprehensive review of your organization, define your needs, and create a document that shows how to incorporate EPM applications into your business. We don’t simply give you the tools – we teach you how to use them to empower your business over time and expand the role of finance to help make smarter decisions to meet overarching business goals.

Looking Ahead

Having modern EPM tools at your disposal is essential for gaining full visibility into current operations, as well as forecasting future performance and needs. Now is a great time to evaluate your organization’s performance and start considering how it can be improved. When planning for the coming year, do you and your employees have the support and knowledge to best guide business decisions? Do you have the applications to support your budget and forecast goals? How do you take the data collected and create an actionable plan for financial growth?

Apps Associates can help organizations prepare for the future by providing guidance in aligning corporate strategy with the right EPM technology. These expansive tools are often underutilized, especially when your specific needs have not been identified. That is where an experienced partner can assist. The Apps Associates team will help you decide which application you need to address your business challenges, and work with you to develop best practices for how and when to use it.

To learn more about how Apps Associates can help you align and empower your business with EPM, visit https://www.astraliscrm.com/applications/epm/.

In part two of this series, we will dive into how to leverage your EPM investment to expand your functionality and enhance existing applications.