Organisations need executive sponsorship and resources to execute their projects, to ensure that enterprise planning management (EPM) pays off.
This is according to Frank Naude, presales manager (business analytics) at SAP Africa, who is one of the keynote speakers at the ITWeb SAP Accenture EPM Executive Forum scheduled for 8 February at the Westcliff Hotel in Johannesburg and 3 March at the Table Bay Hotel in Cape Town.
On top of securing executive sponsorship, Naude says businesses should also revisit the original business case and run a tight project while watching out for scope creep - change in a project's scope after the project work has started.
Naude says so because he believes that more and more local organisations are beginning to realise the benefits of EPM solutions though they have a fair share of challenges.
“Customers are seeing the bigger picture, but focusing on the immediate needs first. For some, it is faster, accurate, collaborative planning. For others, it is compliant and accurate financial consolidation and faster close,” he says.
Naude explains that this also extends to shared-service charge-backs where the need is for accurate and transparent information.
“Performance monitoring and evaluation is naturally high on the agenda for the public sector, but definitely of interest to the private sector who need to ensure strategic alignment and focus.”
Also, Naude points out, businesses now understand that they cannot look at EPM is isolation. “There are critical connections from the underlying business systems to EPM, but also to governance, risk and compliance, business intelligence and the underlying management of information,” he explains.
All these disciplines, he adds, are fundamental to giving visibility to information that is timely, accessible, compliant, accurate and trustworthy. “So, there are many areas on the agenda that require attention. We increasingly find ourselves talking about a roadmap rather than a point solution.”
According to Naude, medium to large companies have been faster to pick up on the EPM side, while the smaller companies are dealing more with immediate business intelligence challenges.
Among the challenges facing EPM in SA, Naude singles out skills shortage as a major drawback. “Local skills were a bit of a challenge in some areas to meet the market demand.”
To alleviate this limitation, he says education is the key. “We are proactively working with SAP Education and our partners to ensure formal skills transfer takes place.
“We also take every opportunity to share information with our community directly or through various other channels. We also have a very energised user group,” he says.
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