An enterprise performance management system can be apowerful tool in helping credit unions achieve better financialperformance, mitigate risk, achieve profitability and rewardemployees. An EPM system should be a credit union's centralreporting and analytics tool for financial and operationalperformance, as it can culminate data across the entire institution(including data surrounding loans, deposits, employees, payroll,etc.) versus just a GAAP income statement. As such, an EPM systemis not a large data warehouse, but rather a single source offinancial truth that a credit union can leverage to evaluate andreport on the institution's performance.

Credit unions of all sizes are implementing EPM systems toreport and forecast results and profitability, and with today'stechnology, it is easy to develop a system that will dissect aninstitution by segment, branch product, officer and member.However, the challenges that many credit unions often face is acase of information overload when it comes to evaluating its dataand reporting needs and how to manage the implementationprocess.

Before getting started, credit unions should carefully considerwhat data and reporting is truly necessary and how theywant to measure results for more effective performancemeasurements, budgeting, forecasting, margin management andprofitability – otherwise they run the risk of collecting,processing and storing data they simply do not need. To counterthis, credit unions must ask themselves questions such as: