Solutions for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI)
Objective of any organization shall be creation of additional value for all members who realize that their own goals can be reached by working together. At that means of improvement of current company operations are well known and in order keep on thriving and growing it is necessary to take a step from operation efficiency further to competence of management.Information analysis support of the company is the necessary condition of competent management of process for manufacturing of goods and services, economic analysis and management decision making. In classification of analytical systems experts usually use three parameters: kind of task in question, its scale and technological composition.
By kind of task being solved the systems can be divided into applications customized for financial, marketing and investment analysis, for financial and project management. In respect of scale the systems can be divided into applications designed for work automation of one specialist, collective work or solving of tasks in territorial divided structure. And finally in terms of technological criteria the systems are divided into monolithic and customizable.
When choosing information analysis systems it is necessary to have not only comprehensive idea of business processes in the company but also understanding of final goals and way of their attaining.
Development foundation
Today in the heat of serious economic crisis a lot of companies focus on survival. Their goal is to wait out the recession and strategy – reduction of expenses. They are going to work in usual manner just a bit less. Such approach shall help them to survive but will heavily weaken their market presence. Such companies will lose their ground when economic upturn starts. Twenty years of advantageous economic environment apparently made the managers forget that upturn is always followed by slump. And receipt for economic upturn shall be retention of development basis even amid the crisis.
Today there three conditions for work.
- First: immediate increase of transparency. If company does not have access to the required information about the market and its business, then it works blindfold. The basis for management of business efficiency shall be strong analytical foundation.
- Second: implementation of rolling forecast along with or instead of traditional budget. It is senseless to follow the plan, it is necessary to follow reality that changes every day.
- Third: management of business efficiency in order to regain the trust to business and market. The organization should say what it does and do what it says. Critical information must be shared with all interested parties.
Review of management approaches
In period of changes any business structure will first of require review of management approaches: optimization of management processes, minimization of owning cost of information systems, utilization of quality management information, binding of strategic goals and operating activities. Hence importance of wisely organized procedures of strategic financial management, reporting consolidation and dynamic forecasting is drastically increasing. Effective use of information technologies becomes one of the most important conditions for successful business.
Here are just some problems that steadily lead companies to necessity to use solutions for management of their effectiveness:
- It is difficult for business to adapt to fast-changing surrounding and economic conditions;
- It is difficult to control to which extend individual and group goals and results complies with corporate ones;
- Persons who make decisions do not have access to single and reliable presentation of financial and operating results;
- It is difficult to match plans and their execution in a timely manner, thus it is difficult to define timely what must done to reach the goals;
- Forecasts for future are unreliable;
- Process of preparation of financial statements (managerial and official) is ineffective, shareholders receive the required information untimely;
- It is impossible to define profitability of product \ service \ line of business with breakdown into market segments and distribution channels;
- Divisional managers are not satisfied that information for making of financial and operative decisions are unreliable and being prepared for too long;
- Data existing in ERP system is not used for receipt of information useful for business;
- Set of business definitions and metrics is not agreed between divisions of the company; distribution of reference data to various corporate systems takes too much time and resources.
