EPM Center of Excellence
An EPM center of excellence (CoE) is a unified effort to ensure adoption and best practices and to drive transformation in performance management processes and the use of technology-enabled solutions. Lately, organizations have been adopting this approach to ensure that they continue to get more value out of their investment in cloud enterprise performance management (EPM).
See how to build your own EPM CoE.
Create and run an EPM center of excellence
Why create an EPM center of excellence?
An EPM CoE promotes the most effective use of an EPM platform and helps you deliver better business results. While adopting the cloud, organizations gather knowledge and best practices. Having a centralized area for all this information benefits all the teams, departments, and entities throughout your organization. In the context of EPM, these best practices can include actively searching and eliminating manual processes to increase process efficiency, continuously leveraging out-of-the-box scheduling and integration capabilities, and automating searches for insights.
For organizations that have a digital-first strategy, creating a center of excellence specifically for EPM is a logical extension of their cloud strategy. Not only does a CoE help mitigate risk in cloud adoption and process transformation efforts, it also becomes an executive’s tool to lead change management initiatives.
And for organizations that are migrating their first on-premises performance management applications to the cloud, an EPM CoE helps drive continuous innovation. Leveraging a CoE enables you to increase efficiency by driving reviews and identifying automation opportunities while creating awareness of process improvements and communicating success to internal stakeholders.
How to build an EPM CoE
Your organization can accelerate its cloud transformation by creating a multidisciplinary center of excellence team that includes executive sponsors, key stakeholders, finance representatives, and business and technical implementation teams.
The CoE team oversees your cloud initiative. It leads your organizational change management process, develops a workforce readiness plan, and serves as a steering committee for cloud standards and policy definition. The team also manages the cloud adoption roadmap, mapping released features to your enhancement requests.
Measure your success
Every company will have its own metrics to measure success. Your organization's mission and vision should be the guiding principle for your cloud adoption initiative.
With your organization's business strategy in place, identify the value of moving to the cloud. Evaluate the reasons behind the move, define the goals that you want to accomplish, and identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) for success. Examples of KPIs include:
- Lower your total cost of ownership by reducing technical debt.
- Increase cost savings from reduced implementation time with prebuilt functionality, such as dashboards and reports.
- Focus on what matters by increasing automation and best practices, giving users more time for more strategic tasks.
- Accelerate digital transformation initiatives with rapid access to EPM innovation.
- Increase adoption of emerging technologies, such as AI and ML.
- Reduce the time spent on tasks, such as closing the books, generating management reports, and preparing monthly forecasts.
- Increase the number accounts that are automatically reconciled.
- Reduce maintenance and administration time for your EPM service.
Plan your roadmap
When planning your roadmap for EPM adoption, you can decide to implement several initial business processes or features, bringing in more capabilities over time. As you define your journey, you’ll want to leverage as many of the Cloud EPM platform capabilities as possible as these will save you time during the implementation. These capabilities include:
- Increased automation and use of built-in best practices.
- Improved collaboration and communication.
- Upgraded remote-work processes.
- Increased adoption of technologies, such as AI and machine learning (ML), so that you can easily meet growing ESG demands.
To ensure that your roadmap is aligned with Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), request Cloud EPM roadmap information.
Connected planning
As you continue your cloud EPM transformation, keep in mind that while there are many departments and teams within an organization that have their own planning processes, these processes are often disconnected from finance. To learn more about how to connect and improve planning across your enterprise, check out the resources below.
More than a carbon footprint: ESG paves a path forward with vision and values
Wayne Heather, EPM Product Marketing Director, Oracle
When the idea of sustainable investing was born in the 1960s, it was a vehicle for supporting companies engaged in environmental and social good at a cost to their bottom line. Today, sustainability is measured in terms of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues—essentially, a company's green footprint.
Read the complete postPutting structure around how your organization uses Oracle Cloud EPM is just as crucial as your decision to implement. An EPM center of excellence enables you to leverage as many of the platform’s capabilities as possible so you can gain the agility to outperform.Cormac Steer Senior Director of Finance, Oracle
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On-demand webinar
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Learn about best practices for creating an EPM center of excellence.