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Strive for a better performance level
07 March 2010 By Dermot Corrigan
In today's difficult economic climate, companies must perform to their optimum level. Managers need to give strategic direction, while fine-tuning operational performance, if business success is to be achieved.
Communicating insights and guiding actions can be difficult, however, especially as organisations become more complex, staff become more mobile and new technologies emerge. Owners or managers looking to implement changes in response to business issues are often faced with the challenge of translating strategic thinking into real change at all levels of the company.
This is where business performance management software (BPM) - also called enterprise performance management (EPM) - comes in. BPM systems tend to be overall guidance systems for companies, according to Patricia Stack, business analytics leader with IBM Global Business Services.
"BPM is focused on providing the right information to the right people at the right time," said Stack. "It supports organisations translating strategies into plans, to monitor their execution and to provide insight to improve performance.
BPM gives organisations the ability to improve decision-making, productivity and efficiency by creating an environment where relevant, actionable, accurate and timely information is available to monitor and improve performance." BPM involves a mix of the strategic and the operational, according to Frank Buytendijk, vice president and fellow of enterprise performance management at Oracle.
"With a performance management system you can start at a strategic level and work with all stakeholders to manage their requirements or contributions," said Buytendijk. "It helps you to analyse the market, formulating strategies and benchmarking your performance against others. It also helps you to analyse operational performance, fine-tune it and figure out what you have to improve in order to do better."
BPM systems are typically used by staff members viewing and using personalised dashboards or scorecards, which provide access to data they need to do their job or targets they need to reach. Jason Ward, sales manager at SAP Ireland, said that these interfaces were typically intuitive and easy to use.
"All users, from the high-end analyst to the casual business user, have access to the information they need with minimal dependence on IT resources and developers," said Ward. "This means that employees are empowered to make important decisions based on accurate information. Users throughout the enterprise can access, format, analyse, navigate and share information across the organisation."
Stack said that BPM pushed usable information to where it was most useful in the company, leading to better decision-making at all levels.
"People at all levels need better information to enable them to make accurate decisions at a faster pace," she said. "Unfortunately, information gaps are often enterprise-wide, from general management, marketing and sales, to customer service, human resources and information technology. This can lead to decision-making that is based on instinct, subjective data and often incorrect information."
No company was too big or small to need help with its business performance management, Buytendijk said.
"Performance management is equally important for all sizes of organisations, and they need the same level of functionality and complexity," he said. "The delivery mechanisms may be different though - large organisations tend to keep their stuff in-house - while mid-size organisations might find it makes more sense to run it on demand."
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