Business Performance Management: Answering Today's Challenges

Over the last decade, the business world has made a paradigm shift in the way they think of business process reengineering (BPR). Senior business managers now base their BPR discussions on the concepts of "value adding" and "innovation", aiming to reengineer business processes so that their organization's operations and customer-facing services become more agile, dynamic, transparent, governable, and profitable. Talk of BPR is now framed in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Key Performance Measures (KPM). The days of reinvigorating business practices throughout a given operational or supply chain, without an exact understanding of ROI (i.e. proper implementation of KPI/KPM around the process), are officially past.

The confusion, ambiguity and lack of consensus about what enterprise performance management is will continue for a long time. Fortunately, many are realizing that performance management is much broader than how it's often narrowly perceived: as just a CFO initiative with a bunch of dashboard dials and better financial reporting. However, since it is so broad, then what is enterprise performance management?

Dashboard Insight recently spoke with iDashboard's Shadan Malik about the role of Chief Performance Officer and how digital dashboard technology can assist the U.S. government's budget process - and more.

The reporting of performance measures has advanced through its own stages of maturity. The display of performance information for control has advanced from the old Red Baron single-engine triplane with rudder-and-stick control to today’s Airbus-style jet navigation. The cockpits are certainly different.

Worldwide, businesses are in critical times. The impact of the financial tornado that touched ground with fiery in the U.S. in late 2008 is one that is now felt globally. Organizations that survived the initial hit were besieged with rampant layoffs and organizational restructuring, worsening human capital issues including the impending retirement of baby boomers, their post-internet “replacements” and the worldwide skills shortage. Managers struggle to maintain performance levels with fewer workers, while increasing their productivity and optimizing their skills. But where do they start?

Companies, organizations and government agencies are all seeking to improve their customer value, efficiency and effectiveness. While there are many approaches to improving performance, it is the combination of management perspective, an appropriate improvement methodology and visibility into and the ability to analyze relevant measures of performance that will yield best results.

Performance metrics are a powerful tool of organizational change. The adage that "What gets measured gets done," is true. Companies that define objectives, establish goals, measure progress, reward achievement, and display the results for all to see can turbo-charge productivity and gracefully move an organization in a new direction.

One of the fun but also frustrating aspects of enterprise performance management is dealing with the confusion about what it is and is not. Debates abound among IT analysts, management consultants, business journalists and software vendors – just to name a few groups.

Managing the performance of your suppliers, a critical component of overall supply and demand chain management, can have a material impact on your company's revenue growth and operating margin. Not investing in how you manage supplier performance, especially in a down economy, can have a negative impact on your profits, assets and cash flow. This article lays out a framework — a "management operating system" — for the discipline of closed-loop supplier performance management (SPM) and shows the hard-dollar return on investment that this discipline can deliver.