Co-ordinating a company’s different roles and departments to work together effectively is challenging. Teams often operate in silos, have distinct goals, and rely on separate data sources, leading to misaligned strategies and missed opportunities. EPM can bridge these operational gaps, integrating data across departments, aligning objectives, and offering actionable insights.

Here are the 5 key things companies should look out for to ensure that their EPM systems deliver real results:

Data control

An effective EPM solution should unify data from multiple departments to provide a comprehensive view of your business performance and profitability metrics. With cohesive data, the ability to drill down into more detail or focus on key issues becomes faster and easier. Problems in processes, such as bottlenecks and inefficiencies, are removed, improving speed while eliminating silos or free-standing activities that fragment critical information.

Smart strategy

While some companies are investing in their own AI practices, this isn’t necessary for finance professionals using a good EPM system. These use AI and ML to provide predictive analytics to help teams anticipate future trends and challenges so they can strategise proactively. Instead of merely reacting to current data, effective EPM tools empower organisations to plan ahead and make more informed decisions.

In addition to connecting and integrating vast amounts of operational and financial data within a single platform to provide a better foundation for strategising, smart EPM systems offer a high degree of flexibility, allowing analysts and executives to model different scenarios and easily see different views or segments of the data.

Perfect planning

Modern EPM solutions deliver substantial enhancements to the planning function, including better capabilities for long-range strategic planning, better financial and operational planning features, and a single enterprise view of the plan, budget and forecasts. Integrating planning activities makes it possible to better balance strategic and tactical options for changes or new processes that will drive business success, while eliminating any mistakes that can be made when different plans rely on inconsistent processes.

Augmenting traditional planning processes with advanced predictive planning will also improve the accuracy of plans and forecasts. An EPM platform that delivers pre-built, best-practice planning tools for the finance function and lines of business enables organisations to get more value faster, aligning finance with operational lines of business for greater agility and insight to drive the business forward.

Real reports

Deploying an effective EPM solution makes it easier to enhance the close process and optimise reporting and results, enabling the finance team to deliver faster. One of the most important benefits of next-generation EPM is the provision of customised, accurate reports, whether they narrative reports, disclosure, financial reporting or ad hoc analysis. EPM systems continuously measure performance against predetermined budgets and goals. They allow you to compare historical data with real-time figures so you can gauge progress against your target objectives and make timely adjustments to achieve them.

A complete suite

Your EPM suite should address the needs across the entire finance office, including comprehensive financial close, enterprise-wide financial and operational planning, allocation of profitability and cost across the business, and statutory and management reporting and analysis processes. Your EPM solution should also provide seamless connections across EPM processes, so actual results from financial close directly feed plans and forecasts, and should integrate seamlessly with core ERP systems.

Many organisations are still using legacy spreadsheet approaches, but these are woefully inadequate to meet today’s business requirements. Modern EPM implementations generate critical reports and analyses in minutes instead of hours or weeks, drastically reducing the time needed to understand business results and respond appropriately.