Strategic Business Management

16

WHERE DO YOU BEGIN IMPLEMENTING ANALYTICS-BASED PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT?

As organisations embrace the full vision of analytic-based enterprise performance management (EPM)—not just the narrow, financial definition of better budgeting, planning and control—they frequently ask, ‘Where should we start?’ Some may be eager to begin with a balanced scorecard, others by measuring channel and customer profitability. Still others want to redesign their core business processes.

In fact, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on which of the analytic-based EPM methodologies provides the fastest, significant return and gets the employee buy-in ball rolling.

As described at the beginning of this book, analytics-based EPM is not new. Organisations have been doing it for years, arguably, even before computers arrived on the scene. However the traditional version of analytic-based EPM involved an implicit management strategy that was followed up by measurements of customer service, sales and order-fulfilment functions. It did not seek to integrate the various components of analytics-based EPM or to develop proactive core processes. Today, organisations realise they must integrate methodologies and their supporting systems, visually display measurements and apply predictive analytics to their processes.

As organisations realise that analytics-based EPM is really much more about improving performance rather than just controlling and managing it, they begin asking when do we begin to ...