Become a performance manager in your department using integrated reports, metrics and plans based on proven sweet spots of information. Discover new and more effective ways to cut costs, boost margins and manage risk.

• Finance: Finance evaluates the soundness of the issues and decisions your company faces every day. It is a balancing act. On one side, Finance must focus on checks and controls to comply with legal, tax and accounting regulations and requirements. On the other side, it must be able to advise the business on future directions, performance and opportunities.

  Information feeds this process. The ability to consolidate results, report and analyze what’s happened, and shape what will happen is critical to the organization. As the custodian of shareholder value, Finance needs dynamic tools to balance compliance and performance, accounting and business structures, short term and long term, top-down vision and bottom-up reality. These tools let Finance:

  • Close the books, consolidate results and report performance.
  • Set performance targets, align resource plans and forecast business results to meet or beat expectations.
  • Define, understand and lead your company's decision-making for better performance management.
• Customer Service: Customer Service is central to the customer relationship, acting both as an advocate for the customer within the company and as an advocate for the company with the customer.

  A responsive, informed service organization can improve the customer experience and your performance. Finding patterns in problems such as delivery delays, information requests, complaints and claims leads to proactive solutions. And a good department should prioritize service efforts for key customer segments, so companies don't lose their most profitable customers.

  Customer Service should also communicate customer performance metrics to the rest of the organization, so other departments are able to find and correct the root causes of customer issues.

  Customer Service is a critical barometer of a company's value proposition, and can bring excellence to the customer experience. For it to be effective, companies should focus on four core decision areas for better performance management:

  • On-time delivery
  • Information, complaints and claims
  • Service benchmarks
  • Service value
• Marketting: Marketing must be a player in your company boardroom, connecting the dots between strategic objectives, operational execution and financial criteria. To do this, Marketing must fulfill its traditional responsibilities, and evolve to become an investment advisor to the business. For better performance, Marketing must help define:
  • The overall investment strategy: What is sold, where and to whom.
  • The strategic path to maximize return on the company's assets (ROA).
  • The cost justification for how to get there, the return on investment (ROI) numbers for your scarce marketing dollars.

  Marketing can also be an early detection system for how changes in the market lead to changes in products and services, selling strategies or even more far-ranging operational elements of the business. For example, sudden drops in response rates for traditionally successful marketing efforts could mean competitor pressure, market shifts and/or revenue trouble down the road.

  Marketing has the responsibility for defining, understanding and leading five core areas of the company's decision-making for better performance management:

  • Market opportunities: What is the profit opportunity?
  • Competitive positioning: What are the competitive risks to achieving it?
  • Product life-cycle management: What is our value proposition?
  • Pricing: What is it worth?
  • Demand generation: How do we reach and communicate value to customers?
• Human Resources: Human Resources must demonstrate positive ROI from human capital investments. To do this, it must evolve beyond managing administrative requirements—such as payroll, benefits and sick leave—to become a strategic partner in business performance.

  HR needs to guide the alignment of employee roles, job functions, talent and individual performance with business results and goals, and track results. HR must also find, assess, develop and retain the talent that drives the business. It should define the factors for employee success and institute practices that guide employees toward consistent and measurable outcomes.

  Human Resources is responsible for defining, understanding and leading five core areas of your organization’s decision-making and performance management:
  • Organization and staffing: What job functions, positions, roles and capabilities are required to drive the business performance?
  • Compensation: How should we reward our employees to retain and motivate them for full performance?
  • Talent and succession: What are the talent and succession gaps we must address to ensure sustained performance?
  • Training and development: What training and development do we need to maximize employee performance? Is there a clear payback?
  • Benefits: How do we manage costs and incentives for better performance?
• Operations: Operations is the delivery mechanism of the business, providing both what the business sells and how that product gets to market. For Operations to win at the margins, it must balance the need to reduce costs while staying agile enough to respond to customer demands.

  Operations must have accurate, timely information about product demand from the frontline functions of the business—Sales, Marketing and Finance. Without it, the business stands to lose operational efficiency and profit margin. At the same time, the organization must identify and eliminate process time-wasters.The more steps in the process, the higher the bottleneck and downtime risks as well as costs.

  Information sweet spots can improve Operations decision-making and performance in six core areas of performance management:

  • Purchasing and procurement: Ensuring timely and cost-effective input of resources.
  • Production and capacity: Generating timely output in the face of uncertain demand, complicated processes and variances in input.
  • Inventory management: Understanding the balance between holding cash and delivering on customer service requirements.
  • Distribution and Logistics: Achieving efficient distribution and delivery.
  • Cost and quality management: Balancing the need to reduce costs with the equal requirement to deliver quality output.
  • Process efficiency: Designing a process to monitor and analyze performance benchmarks to find opportunities for greater efficiency.
• Information Technology: IT can be to your company what high-tech firms have been to the economy: a catalyst for change and an engine driving rapid growth. Why? Technology and information have become so important to how companies operate that even small changes can dramatically affect your ability to manage the performance of the business.

  This opportunity is reflected in your company's IT assets accumulated over years due to large IT budgets, often second only to payroll in size.

  • How many of these assets are still underutilized, for whatever reason?
  • What impact on results would an across-the-board 10% increase in return on assets (ROA) have?

  IT's daily pressures often derive from thankless, sometimes no-win tasks, such as ensuring core service levels of up-time, data quality, security and compliance. Beyond these basic operations - "keeping the lights on" - IT must also respond to the never-ending and always-changing needs of their business customers.

• Sales: A Sales force with the right information, at the right time and driven by the right incentives is formidable. Accurate and speedy information can help improve sales results and reduce selling costs. And information flowing through Sales can affect every other department in the company. For example, high demand forecasts can drive greater future production.

  Unfortunately, better performance management for many Sales departments is hindered by three barriers:

  • You don't set sales targets and allocate effort based on maximizing overall contribution. Many companies focus on short-term revenue. So Sales does not have or need a perspective on long-term customer contributions. As a result, it doesn't measure cross-sell and up-sell revenue paths or the estimated life-time value of a customer.
  • There is no two-way clearinghouse for the right information at the right time. Companies need customer insight into what works, what doesn't and what is most important. Without this information, Sales reps are at a disadvantage in trying to build reliable customer relationships and loyalty.
  • You don't measure the underlying drivers of sales effectiveness. Your goal is to increase sales productivity and adjust tactics when something doesn't work. If you don't set expectations and monitor the underlying drivers of sales effectiveness, you will likely suffer both higher selling costs and missed sales targets.
• Executive Management bears the ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the business. As Chief Balancing Officers, Executive Management needs to understand and manage across financial and operational systems.

  This is the crux of its information challenge. And it is the most significant advantage of a performance management system.

  Executive Management has two decision areas like those from other departments, and four compound decision areas that reflect their particular balancing role. The first two are:

  • Risk Management: Are we managing the risks of sustaining this performance?
  • Compliance Management: Are we complying with regulatory requirements?

  The four compound decision areas draw on information sweet spots from across your organization. The top decision area is financial, and the other three are the operational elements that underpin the financial data. A performance management system brings these four decision areas together.