Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM)

The Microsoft® Office EPM Solution is an end-to-end collaborative project and portfolio environment which helps organisations gain visibility and insight into all work, enhancing decision-making, improving alignment with business strategy, maximising resource utilisation, and making it possible to measure and increase operational efficiency.

The Office EPM Solution provides a central repository for project and resource information to effectively manage and prioritise projects and resources across organisations.

Key elements within the EPM Suite are the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007, which offers effective collaboration and management of resources, tasks, risks and dependencies across a large number of projects and organisational areas, and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 which is a top-down portfolio management solution that helps organisations to add value by identifying, selecting, managing, and delivering portfolios that best align with their business strategy.

Portfolio Server also provides a framework and capability to automate and standardise governance processes; consolidate business and IT investments within an enterprise-wide repository; tightly integrate with Project Server to track the performance of each investment throughout its life cycle, from business case to benefits realisation.

Clarity is a fully integrated software solution which offers functionalities from idea-related decision-making to prioritisation and analysis, taking into consideration existing resource allocations and a diverse range of budgetary perspectives. In the tool itself, one can carry out both strategic as well as tactical planning, including execution and controlling management for single or multiple projects, in a flexible manner.

CA Clarity PPM is well suited for use as project portfolio management solution. When choosing a PPM solution however, requirements for a comprehensive portfolio management tool, including integrated aspects such as financial and resource planning, as well as company-wide deployment are strong arguments for choosing Clarity.

It is important to realise that a successful PPM implementation depends less on the individual strengths and weaknesses of the PPM software, but more on how an organisations business processes are depicted, how the applications are integrated into the environment, and whether or not a user-focused implementation approach is employed.

Planview Enterprise is a comprehensive decision-making platform that drives performance by delivering unprecedented transparency into the trade-offs involved in key business decisions across the enterprise. With Planview Enterprise, you can use the discipline of portfolio management to successfully balance goals and risks with money and resources; this helps you make better decisions around strategies, projects, services, and applications.

Planview Enterprise combines comprehensive demand management with real-time portfolio analytics, best-of-breed resource management, and action-driven processes. Working together, these capabilities give customers improved visibility, fewer redundancies, increased efficiency, and the ability to focus limited resources on higher-value work. By integrating analytics with root-cause analysis, Planview Enterprise enables true optimisation, yielding even greater efficiency and productivity.

Primavera is Oracle’s offering in the EPM space. Massive amounts of data require sophisticated, yet highly flexible organisational tools. This tool is designed to handle large-scale, highly sophisticated and multifaceted projects and can be used to organise projects containing up to 100,000 activities while providing an unlimited number of resources and target plans.