Organisations face a relentless wave of challenges in the fast-paced world of modern business. From fluctuating market conditions and shifting customer expectations to the emergence of disruptive Industry 4.0 technologies, the need for agility and adaptability has never been more critical. Enter Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), a strategic framework businesses use to navigate this complexity and achieve sustainable success.

Today, many organisations face significant hurdles in achieving effective EPM hindering their ability to adapt and thrive. Key challenges include:

• • Siloed Planning Applications: Departments often rely on separate planning tools and data, resulting in a fragmented view of the organisation. This leads to overly summarised information that obscures critical details and nuances. In addition, individual departments prioritise their own goals, potentially overlooking broader organisational needs.
• • Rigid and Manual Processes: Traditional planning cycles are often time-consuming, and manual data entry and reconciliation are labour-intensive. Annual planning cycles struggle to accommodate unexpected market shifts or changing conditions.

These limitations create brittle organisations that struggle to respond effectively to dynamic environments, ultimately impacting their competitiveness and resilience.

In the parallel AI-driven world, enterprises constantly seek ways to extract maximum value from their ever-growing data assets. Traditional data architectures, with their inherent limitations, often struggle to keep pace. Enter the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, a modern Lakehouse approach that combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes to deliver a unified, governed, cost-effective, and scalable solution.

In this blog post, we will explore how consolidating EPM applications onto the Data Intelligence Platform and surfacing insights through software technologies like Sigma Computing reduces complexity, decreases costs and drives performance forward.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform offers a robust framework for consolidating diverse data types, from raw unstructured data to structured tables, within a unified platform. This "Lakehouse" architecture transcends traditional divisions between data lakes and data warehouses, empowering organisations to implement consistent governance policies and security measures across their entire data estate. Leveraging open-source components, the platform avoids vendor lock-in, providing flexibility and interoperability.

By combining the flexibility of data lakes with the reliability and performance of data warehouses, Databricks facilitates a collaborative environment where data consumers can leverage AI/ML for advanced analytics. At the same time, business intelligence teams can perform reporting and dashboards, all working together seamlessly on the same data foundation. This unified approach accelerates innovation, improves data-driven decision-making, and fosters a truly data-centric culture.

Sigma Computing enhances data-driven decision-making by seamlessly integrating with Databricks, providing a powerful combination of capabilities without needing to make multiple copies of the data or semantics. Sigma's intuitive spreadsheet-like interface empowers business users of all technical levels to directly interact with massive datasets stored in Databricks, eliminating the need for complex coding. This democratises data access and enables teams to independently perform ad-hoc analyses and generate insights.

Furthermore, this integration strengthens security and compliance by running applications directly on a customer's Databricks instance. This ensures data remains within the organisation's own environment, inheriting Databricks' robust security protocols. By combining Sigma's user-friendly interface with Databricks' powerful data processing, organisations can foster a data-driven culture, accelerate decision-making, and unlock new opportunities for growth and efficiency.

Celebal Technologies is looking to revolutionise the EPM landscape by combining the power of Databricks with the user-friendliness and collaborativeness of Sigma Computing. At the heart of this solution is the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which provides a robust and scalable foundation for handling large volumes of business and financial data. Databricks excels at data processing, storage, and analysis, making it an ideal platform for demanding EPM workloads. However, to truly empower business users, an intuitive interface is needed to interact with this data.

This is where Sigma Computing comes in. Sigma offers a spreadsheet-like interface that is familiar and accessible to finance professionals. Users can easily explore data, build reports, and create dashboards without needing specialised technical skills or writing complex code. This democratises access to data and enables finance teams to perform ad-hoc analysis, gain valuable insights, and make informed decisions.

The EPM solutions developed by Celebal Technologies combine the strengths of both Databricks and Sigma Computing. By leveraging Databricks' powerful data processing capabilities and Sigma's user-friendly interface, Celebal has created a suite of solutions that streamlines planning, analysis, and reporting. This empowers organisations to improve accuracy, collaboration, and efficiency in their EPM processes.