What are Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management?

The majority of established companies in our space have some form of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in place and have for some time.For many years, this was enough to stay competitive.

But that is no longer the case. In today's rapidly-changing business environments new solution niches have emerged that are necessary for taking that next competitive step—business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM).

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence derived historically as a Decision Support System (DSS), today it's described as a set of techniques and tools for accessing raw data and transforming it into meaningful information for the purpose of making smarter business decisions.

BI typically has a set of tools or a platform focused on information delivery and deployed to line-of-business users for the general-purpose of reporting and analysis across the enterprise.

What is Corporate Performance Management?

CPM or EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) used interchangeably, is a set of processes, supported by a suite of applications, that is typically driven by the Finance organization and consists of strategies such as modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting, and analytics.

Today some CPM platforms include embedded BI and analytics tools, which can be used to report and analyze data from various sources to give the enterprise a more holistic view of performance in an organization.

Implementing BI/CPM

How each organization uses BI/CPM is unique. Every single business entity may use different methods, metrics, and tools to analyze things completely unlike organizations even in the same industry.

We know gathering data into intelligence allows organizations to make better informed decisions. The advantages of having a BI/CPM solution have allowed organizations to streamlines processes, consolidate disparate data, improve performance, reduce costs and increase the bottom line among other various benefits.

Having spent a few years learning various BI/CPM solutions, there are a myriad of tools out thereto assist in developing actionable intelligence, but which one works best for your organization is key because not all solutions are created equal.

Some tools integrate better than others. Some are more complex and need a business analyst or IT to run them.There are also some that make data accessible to the person who knows the data best.The key is finding a solution that does allow interaction within the organization lines of businesses.

You don’t want Finance or IT to generate your operational report, you want your Operation’s Manager to tell you what key indicators are needed and be able to create it. Metrics should be established from those who know the data best and the data should be in the hands of the originator.

If you are looking to gain insight into your organization's spending, if you have multiple entities and want to compare operational data, if you have currency problems, if you have so many solutions and you are manually extracting and consolidating, AND you also want to discover how to drive your initiatives and business objectives faster, then consider a BI/CPM solution that can help you make smarter choices.

We live in the smart world, we don’t need to know someone’s phone number or address, we just need our smart phone.Begin your day with smart intelligence by building your BI/CPM processes with the right tools. Generate your BI/CPM methods and then automate them to deliver you actionable intelligence on a regular basis to those who can now make informed and better decisions!