As organisations seek to gain a competitive edge, choosing the most effective EPM solution becomes crucial. In this blog post, we explore the top-ranked EPM solutions, and offer guidance on selecting the best fit for your business. Whether you're looking to streamline financial planning, improve performance reporting, or gain real-time business insights, understanding the current landscape of EPM software will help you make informed decisions that drive success.
Table of Content
I. A quick introduction to EPM software
II. A guide to the market-leading EPM software
III. Who are the leaders in EPM software?
Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software, also known as Corporate Enterprise Management (CPM) software, is designed to help organisations plan, budget, forecast, and report business performance.
An EPM system consolidates data from various sources, such as your ERP system, front/back-office applications, external data sources, and the entire organisation regularly. The solution then analyses these data and turns them into actionable insights.
EPM provides decision-makers with real-time, up-to-the-minute relevant information, predictive analytics capabilities, and intuitive, visualised interfaces to ensure the organisation achieves its goals and objectives and reflects them in its budgets and plans.
The current landscape of EPM software is dotted with various choices from many vendors. All promise great functionality and tremendous benefits. But which one is the right one for you? Fortunately, this report will shed light on such challenging questions.
The current landscape of EPM software is abundant with options from numerous vendors, each promising exceptional functionality and significant benefits. But how do you determine which one is the best fit for your organization? Fortunately, this report provides valuable insights to help answer these challenging questions.
Nucleus Research, one of the leading technology research and analysis firms, periodically issues a special report—Technology Value Matrix—to evaluate and rate EPM vendors and products. As the name suggests, the Matrix assesses EPM systems in two capability dimensions.
The vertical dimension is Usability, and the horizontal dimension is Functionality. Accordingly, EPM products are put in four quadrants: Core Provider, Expert, Facilitator, and Leader.
The following figure shows the latest Value Matrix update for 2024. It presents not only the positions of EPM products but also their directions in the matrix relative to other competitors.
The products in the Leader quadrant, which are ranked high in both organic usability and functionality, include Infor EPM, Vena Solutions, Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, Wolters Kluwer CCH Tagetik, OneStream Software, Prophix, and Board International.
Infor EPM is a suite of applications that manage budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, consolidation, sales, and operational planning. The latest version of Infor EPM is cloud-native and can draw from data from other Infor’s cloud-based solutions, such as SunSystems Cloud, and external databases for seamless data flows.
By connecting to both on-premises and cloud applications, users can build automation and extend Infor EPM to streamline analytics, enhance the user experience, and address unique planning and reporting use cases.
In addition to traditional financial planning and budgeting, Infor EPM also supports other critical areas such as product and investment forecasting, workforce planning, and supply and demand planning.
Infor EPM comes with several industry packages with pre-built templates, reports, and calculations that accelerate implementations and adoption.
Oracle Cloud EPM is a comprehensive financial and operational performance management platform that supports financial planning and analysis (FP&A), financial close and consolidation (FCC), internal and external reporting, extended planning and analysis (xP&A), and account reconciliation.
It offers a combination of out-of-the-box templates for planning and reporting and configurable workflows and data management tools.
In addition, Oracle Cloud EPM is differentiated by its analytics functionality with AI/ML-enabled forecasting, scenario modeling, anomaly detection, and generative AI narrative capabilities.
The solution offers top-notch flexibility, including top-down, bottom-up, zero-based budgeting, profitability, and cost management.
Its capabilities also include financial consolidation, statutory, management, tax reporting, and close process orchestration.
Oracle Cloud EPM can integrate natively with the vendor's ERP, HCM, and CRM applications. Alternatively, organisations can deploy it as a standalone product, integrating with other ERP systems.
Prophix Financial Performance Platform. This platform facilitates budgeting and planning, reporting and analytics, financial close, consolidation (FCC), intercompany management, and workflow automation.
It includes a user-friendly interface that simplifies the use of spreadsheets and integrates with Microsoft Excel to broaden its accessibility. Prophix Academy provides extensive tutorials and videos for swift onboarding.
The software comes with multiple ready-to-use templates and reports for generating financial statements. Prophix allows extensive customisation in reports, dashboards, and financial documents, suiting unique organisational requirements.
Moreover, Prophix utilizes natural language processing and machine learning to detect data irregularities and automate routine FP&A tasks.
Established in 2011, Vena operates on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and integrates with Microsoft Azure’s AI ecosystem to manage financial, operational, and transactional data to bridge the gap between an organisation's finance and functional departments.
Its EPM software, Vena Complete Planning, is differentiated by its Excel compatibility and bi-directional connectors with Microsoft Excel desktop and Microsoft 365. This approach ensures widespread user acceptance, adaptable modeling, and analytical and audit functionalities.
The solution’s growing offering of out-of-the-box templates, workflows, tools, and calculations helps accelerate deployments to keep implementation costs low regardless of industry.
Its comprehensive portfolio that covers ESG and sustainability, financial close and consolidation, financial, management and regulatory reporting, financial and extended planning, and corporate tax solutions tailored for medium to large enterprises.
CCH Tagetik is underpinned by an Analytic Information Hub, enabling users to compile and scrutinize detailed data from various divisions for cohesive business planning and unified reporting.
Moreover, intelligent analytics capabilities, such as AI-driven predictive intelligence and enhanced analytics for deeper insights, are pervasive throughout the platform.
OneStream is differentiated by its unified and extensible data model, which provides capabilities to address enterprise financial consolidation, close processes, planning, and reporting use cases in a single solution.
This integrated planning and consolidation approach enables finance teams to allocate less time to data and system management, focusing more on value-added analysis.
Focused on catering to mid to large enterprise customers, Board International offers its intelligent planning platform, encompassing FP&A, consolidation and closure, lease accounting, supply chain management, and retail planning functionalities.
Beyond its core strengths in FP&A, Board offers financial consolidation and reporting functionality. Users can leverage Board to access and analyze data from diverse sources, create and manage configurable dashboards, and generate automated reports for real-time sharing and monitoring.
Board’s predictive analytics capabilities enable users to leverage machine learning for forecasts, what-if scenario modeling, and cluster and segmentation analysis.
Once you have decided to embark on an Enterprise Performance Management implementation project, the difference between success and failure begins with selecting the right package for your business from a host of EPM vendors, products, configurations, and feature sets. At the end of the day, it is all about your requirements, and whether the chosen solution is the right fit for your organisation. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, nor is there a simple approach. You need in-depth knowledge about EPM software and the marketplace, accompanied by a systematic and meticulous selection process.