KPI Services

Performance Management

Business leaders have taken steps to manage costs and drive greater efficiencies throughout their organizations. As they wait to experience the full impact of these measures, their businesses compete in market conditions that continue to be volatile. Against this backdrop they must also respond to new regulatory pressures, which demand unprecedented levels of transparency into performance and performance drivers. Business performance today is under intense scrutiny from all sides, internally and externally. Under this pressure, weaknesses in entrenched approaches to managing business performance are making themselves felt: established activities for managing performance are inflexible and disconnected; corporate strategy is not well understood throughout the ranks; and, as a result, execution suffers.

Some of the most common challenges to measuring up against new performance dynamics include:

• Predictability: drive sustainable and consistent performance outcomes. 
• Visibility: establish a clear sightline into what’s impacting performance. 
• Accountability: equip people with strategy-wired information that lets them effectively take charge of specific performance outcomes. 
• Agility: respond on-the-fly to changing market opportunities 
• Confidence: manage and make decisions from a common set of numbers and assumptions. 
•  Alignment: ensure that all parts of the business are on-strategy and pulling in the same direction.

While these common challenges to driving best-in-class performance are diverse, they can be addressed with a whole-company approach to corporate performance management that is supported by the right enabling technology. Business leaders are feeling the pain and are coming to critical realization: whole-company, Performance Management (PM), as a business process, is largely unsupported in a consistent way across their organizations. Rather, performance is managed in disparate pockets of planning, budgeting, reporting, and other often rigid management activities. Unlike transactional and other systemic processes like order-entry or accounts receivable that are automated and connected with one another, PM processes are under-equipped, leaving businesses vulnerable to underperformance. In response, essential changes are under way. Performance-driven organizations are seeking ways to be more flexible so they can respond quickly and effectively to changing business conditions.

Strategy and execution are the ultimate drivers of business performance. While technology does not actually deliver business strategy, it enables alignment and solid execution. As business leaders pursue best-in-class performance with renewed vigor, they are looking to enterprise information technology solutions to help them establish processes for managing repeatable and predictable performance. Performance management is about people processes—understanding and decision making; it’s not about data processes—capturing and organizing operational data.

KPI consultants will help your organization achieve significant Return on Investment through the implementation of a solid Performance Management infrastructure:
The strategic objective of performance management is to create a stable environment for continuous value creation. As organizations take a long, hard look at what they must change or simply learn to do better to drive performance at all levels throughout the company, they are also carefully weighing return on investment from enabling technologies. No one ever sets out to waste IT dollars. But the ROI lessons of Y2K, ERP, and CRM are top-of-mind along with the well-intentioned promises that accompanied these multimillion- dollar IT investments. Today, the “go big or go home” approach to IT investment is not easily justified. While it’s true that taking on PM requires top-down, long-term commitment, having an Enterprise-wide vision does not have to equal to the complete execution or implementation of this vision right at the beginning. In fact, when it comes to Performance Management, having a global vision and executing one phase at the time is the key to success.

There are many levels of performance management that need to be aligned and balanced—long-term objectives and short-term goals; corporate strategies and line of business plans; planning cycles and day-to-day execution. By starting small, tangible return on investment can be had quickly, and that success can be radiated incrementally to other parts of the organization.

KPI consultants will help your organization put hard numbers on soft benefits:

Today most IT solutions represent a better way of operating:

• A better way to process invoices or log customer complaints
• A better way to schedule production runs or track inventory levels.

Payback is gauged in terms of operational benefits that reduce costs, increase profit margin, and so on. This is the kind of traditional ROI that people are looking for. But how is a company realizing ROI from improved performance? The real issue is nailing down where the ROI comes from when dealing with management processes, versus the more familiar territory of operational processes. No one ever says, “If I could just squeeze three percent more effectiveness out of my management process…” But today, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that will help organizations make the connection between their PM initiatives and the bottom line. Managing performance is part of the DNA of doing business. When it’s enabled by software solutions that strengthen the whole management process systemically throughout the company, the implications are enormous. Planning, Budgeting, Performance Monitoring, Reporting, Analysis, and other management activities become connected to each other and to corporate strategy. People on the front lines not only understand the strategy, but have clear sight into how their day-to-day activities are affecting business performance and know what to change in order to improve it.