Achieving and sustaining profitability has always been a challenge. With increasing competition, evolving customer demands, and economic uncertainties, maintaining a profitable bottom line requires more than just traditional financial management approaches.

From time-consuming manual processes, to a lack of visibility into profits by products, services, channels, customers, brands or projects, there are many reasons that companies struggle to achieve the kind of sustained growth that they need. Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) helps businesses to not only manage but also drive profitability effectively while unlocking business potential to deliver results.

Control and visibility

One of the biggest challenges organisations face is having to rely on more than one system for their financial needs. Whether they have to contend with dozens of spreadsheets, complex reporting requirements, or convoluted processes across divisions or entities, finance teams are still expected to produce accurate numbers. While many CFOs have learned how to overcome these kinds of challenges, the kind of gymnastics required to do so are unnecessary with an effective EPM platform.

Essentially, EPM helps combine the data about all business functions into one place, making it much easier for leaders to access consistent, up-to-the-minute accurate information to inform their decision-making. This significantly reduces time spent collecting and searching for data and improves the effectiveness of how that data is used. In other words, EPM ensures fewer data errors and an increased focus on what really matters, all of which ultimately boosts the bottom line. 

In fact, a good EPM solution allows for complete control and visibility over the organisation’s operations, providing the power to analyse historical and current data at any point in time with the most up-to-date, accurate, and complete information available by pulling from every single aspect and department of the business. This allows issues to be identified before they become major problems, allowing business leaders to be proactive in seeking solutions.

Informed decisions

By providing a single source of updated information, EPM can facilitate better and faster decision-making. With access to real-time data presented in a clear manner, business leaders can make informed decisions based on current and accurate information, contributing to better business outcomes.

EPM provides visibility across all lines of business, along with the cost and profitability performance of each, either independently or combined. This can be used to formulate integrated, agile forecasts that will help the company respond to economic changes in the marketplace while sustaining the business in the long term.

Linking long-term business strategy with the annual financial budgets, for example, is much easier when an EPM platform is implemented and used correctly. Allowing for better alignment of strategic plans to financial budgeting and planning, shorter budget cycles, and the examination of existing margins, EPM can help accurately predict future profitability across a range of business cases and scenarios.

Support growth

With economic uncertainty and volatility making it increasingly difficult for executives to plan and forecast accurately, an integrated EPM platform which unifies processes and helps bridge the gap between goals and results is becoming essential to success. With the right EPM system, companies can reduce their operating costs, improve efficiency, and support growth by helping to increase margins, maximise returns, and identify new opportunities to increase profitability and performance.

An additional benefit of implementing EPM in the business is improved customer service. The advantages offered by the technology for your business will trickle down to improve your customer experiences as well.

In today’s dynamic and competitive business environment, there’s no room for inefficient and ineffective processes. By helping the business overcome most of the barriers limiting an organisation’s ability to invest in business innovation, EPM is the quickest, easiest way to consistently drive business performance and profitable growth.