Starting Your SAP EPM Journey
Are you about to embark on a SAP EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) Strategy Management development exercise? Then you should remember to ask or get answers to the following questions:
- Can you communicate and visualize corporate strategy with all employees and help them understand their role in meeting these objectives?
- Do employees share insights or ask questions about strategic goals?
Is there a forum, such as a wiki, tied to the organization’s objectives that allows all shareholders to collaborate?
- Can performance shortcomings be tied back to initiatives to correct those shortcomings?
- How are initiatives created to address tracked performance shortcomings?
- Can you tie these initiatives to strategic objectives?
- Do objectives have a simple way for employees to maintain their status?
- Do know how many metrics do you track?
Does your organization struggle to determine what true key performance indicators are due to the sheer number of KPI's?
How many metrics/KPI's do you have?
Have you performed a KPI sweep?
- How do you ensure that resources are deployed on the initiatives that will have the most impact on the organization?
- How effective are Operational Reviews? Do you have access to live data when it’s needed?
- Are business KPI's, Measures, and other Leading Indicators / Operational Analytics implemented uniformly and tied to business objectives?
- Is there active executive management support for BI?
What can be done to strengthen executive support?
- What is your utilization rate of office-based tools like Excel and PowerPoint to create dashboards and scorecards to measure performance?
- If your dashboards are created in enterprise level tools, like SAP Webi or xCelsius, are they fed through to these office tools?
- Who and how many different groups create these dashboards and how much time do they spend creating them?
- How can your users get to the performance information they need to make their decisions?
What are the current challenges to getting this information today?
Are there any pain points with your current Strategy Planning process?
A Successful Strategy Depends Upon a Solid Datawarehouse
These questions, once answered, should provide a solid foundation for building a Strategy Management system linked through to your business intelligence systems and dashboards. SAP SSM is an ideal tool for this.
Need some help developing your own Enterprise Reporting Strategy? We offer a complete suite of SAP Enterprise Performance Management Services.
People who read this article also read:
7 Questions typically answered by a BI Strategy