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

Chapter 7

Execute: From Insight to Actions to Results

Vision without execution is hallucination.

—Thomas A. Edison

Let's take a look at the management operating system in action. You can break down the “E” in EPM to any part of the enterprise: sales, marketing, order to cash, supply chain, workforce, and so on. You can even follow the chain to organizations you partner with. When you focus on each of these parts, they follow the same closed-loop cycle, work off the same data, metadata, and rules, and are enabled by the same technology. The more you unify these components for each part of the enterprise, the less you spend on reinventing the wheel, reworking reports, plans, models, and analyses, and the more you can agree on the numbers.

Everything Is Connected

In Chapter 2, in the Macro and Micro section, I mentioned how the cycle can exist at many levels of the organization. The cycle works at the corporate level, the business-unit level, the business-function level, and the team level. And each level can be interrelated. For example, in Figure 7.1, the commitments at the corporate level can feed the debate at the business-unit level, or can just become the commitment at the business-unit level, and what the business-unit level gathers and understands can feed into the corporate gathering process.

Figure 7.1 The Management Operating System Works from Corporate to Business-Unit Levels

To extend that thinking beyond the four walls of your organization, into your value ecosystem, ...