BIEPM.COM

 In the face of an increasingly fast-paced business environment, many businesses struggleto anticipate, let alone meet, their stakeholders’ objectives. At the same time they are under increasing pressure to maintain strong corporate controls and offer greater degrees of transparency.Misaligned strategies, outdated plans and unreliable forecasts inhibit success. Many businesses depend on performance measures that lack consistency and which fail to reflect the structural business drivers. They cannot reliably understand the past in time to make decisions about the future.In response, business managers are being asked to assimilate vast amounts of information,adopt new management techniques (for example, Economic Value Added (EVA®), Balanced Scorecard, virtual close, event-driven planning, Six Sigma and rolling-forecasts), incorporate evolving legal reporting and disclosure revisions, constantly revise plans, participate in extended business models that include partners in other organizations and leverage investments in existing business systems all in an evermore volatile economic environment driven by globalization, deregulation and the Internet.The situation is further compounded by multiple, stand-alone siloed systems, often distributed across the different countries of operation, that fail to present a unified picture of the business,support collaboration between management teams or drive the execution of frequently revised plans.How can businesses reconcile the enormous pressures they face with the increasingly difficult task of generating the growth in stakeholder value that these same market conditions offer?A large part of the answer lies in adopting the right tools for the job.Business Performance Management is a new term that denotes a process-centric, holisticapproach to business decision-making that is intended to improve the capability of a business to gain insight and manage its performance at all levels by combining stakeholders, managers,staff, customers and suppliers within an integrated management environment.Business Performance Management delivers both timely management information and hosts the individual management processes in a single, interactive and collaborative work space that allows teams of managers, from the board room to individual departments and across the extended supply-chain, to collectively measure performance, anticipate results and drive profitability.In short, Business Performance Management offers the way to strategically improve the quality of the management process and hence grow an organization from a collection of loosely coupled business units into the highly coordinated and agile enterprise that is necessary to succeed in today’s economy.