What is Enterprise Performance Management ?

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a management field of Business Performance Management which considers the visibility of operations in a closed-loop model across all facets of the enterprise. There are several emerging domains in the EPM field which are being driven by corporate initiatives, academic research, and commercial approaches. These include:

1. Strategy Formulation
2. Business Planning and Forecasting
3. Financial Management
4. Supply Chain Effectiveness

Based on the mission and vision of an organization, different strategic needs may drive how EPM domains are leveraged and promoted within an organization. For example a professional services firm based in Canada may view the need to have effective and transparent supply chain operations much differently than a clothing manufacturer with operations throughout the world. What is common in the EPM approach is the closed-loop EPM process model advocated by Kaplan and Norton and their management approaches to strategy formulation including balanced scorecard and strategy map techniques.
Four disciplines exist to define and cover the six stages of the closed-loop EPM process model. The four disciplines are: strategy formulation, business planning and forecasting, financial management, and supply chain effectiveness. The six stages of the closed-loop EPM process model are: strategy development, strategy translation, organization alignment, operations planning, learning and monitoring, and finally testing and adaptation.