Enterprise Performance Management Done Right: An Operating System for Your Organization

Preface

Thank you for buying this book. It was a lot harder to write than I thought. The main problem was removing content—there is so much to Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), it's not easy to make it be just about a few things.

The genesis of this book is my career: For over 30 years I have been involved in Finance Systems and Processes, from my first job at Deloitte, Haskins + Sells as a 19-year-old programmer writing the Journal Entry subsystem for a trial balance program (called ATOM: Audit Techniques On Microcomputers, originally written in dBase II), through Lotus 1-2-3, Accpac, then custom-developed systems (like BOX, the Broker of Obligations and Transactions that connected US Navy purchase cards with Citibank), to nine years at Hyperion Solutions (later acquired by Oracle) where I helped raise the EPM toddler (back then it was called BPM—Business Performance Management.)

However, as they say, I am standing on the shoulders of giants with the content of this book. My EPM epiphany came after watching so many Hyperion professionals whiteboard the RAMP cycle (Report, Analyze, Model, Plan)—which I initially thought was a great way to sell software—when I started noticing clients' visceral reaction to it: “Yes! That's how I want our business to be managed!” So I immersed myself in the EPM system and started noticing all of the untapped business value. Later, I got to take that whiteboard to a whole new level with senior business executives, mostly CEOs and CFOs of name-brand ...