What is EPM and its evolution

Before the dawn of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) we had the dawn of BI which stands for Business intelligence.

The Enterprise Resource Planning revolution fulfilled the need of companies to run their operation on a single platform or technology.

Suddenly companies could integrate their business process from Manufacturing to Accounts Receivable. The major player of the ERP revolution was SAP.

There emerged from the ERP revolution, a need to sift through all those data from various functional areas to create information. This created the Business intelligence revolution and SAP launched the SAP BW data warehouse which had hooks laid into the SAP ERP system for easy extractions of data.

The Business Intelligence software in general talks about the past or the focus is on actuals. It was very clear there is a need for forward looking tool that could cater to executive information needs. One that measures performance of the enterprise against what was projected and one that allows constant adjustments by way of continued monitoring to execute on the strategies of the organization. The EPM toolset was thus born.