Recently I had the pleasure of presenting at the SAP Insider Performance Management 2014 conference. As a part of that event, Ken Murphy with the SAP Insider Studio invited me to sit together to discuss new advances in the area of SAP Enterprise Performance Management (SAP EPM) and how these can support value realization efforts in SAP customers today.
SAP EPM solutions have come a very long way in a very short period of time. When I wrote the first SAP Press book on SAP EPM in 2010, the solution set addressed some very important problems still important today, such as business planning, financial consolidation, and profitability and cost analysis. These problems had to be addressed across solution domains, with different user experiences, and without a common data platform. With the release of EPM 10/10.1 earlier in this year, many of these issues around front-end and back-end solution design have been addressed. In particular, the benefit of having HANA enabled processes for those customers adopting on-premises or cloud solutions, where customers can use HANA as a commonly available financial data platform. As I discuss in my new SAP Press book on Financial Analysis & Planning, these capabilities can be extended to predictive analytics and value realization, through the introduction of SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) which address these areas.
Value realization is a tricky business. Often value is attributed to specific systems-driven initiatives, but these initiatives alone are often not enough to drive expected business value and outcomes. For example, if we don’t agree on decision rights or information ownership at the organization level - or if policies and procedures needed are not described along with supporting systems - things don’t work as expected and benefits are not realized which then can cast doubt on transformation efforts. The Value Realization RDS takes advantage of the SAP Strategy Management application as the backbone solution to track initiatives, record expected value drivers and risk, and assign organizational stakeholders. These can be summarized into a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) model and aligned to specific business driven outcomes and benefits. For more on the Value Realization RDS visit the SAP Marketplace.
Click on the photograph below (or here) to link to the full SAP Insider interview that Ken and I recorded at the conference. Many thanks to Ken and the crew of the SAP Insider Studio, I enjoyed our time together and engaging discussion.
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