Essential Ingredients for an Effective CPM Solution

Essential Ingredients for an Effective Business Performance Management Solution An OutlookSoft White Paper April 2003
Contents Executive Summary 1 A Unified Solution 1 Managing Structured & Unstructured Data 4 Accessibility Enterprise-Wide 5 Leveraging Microsoft Excel 6 Real-Time 7 Checklist 8 About OutlookSoft Corporation 9
Executive Summary Effectively managing your company's business performance hinges on getting the straight and accurate story behind the numbers that represent both past results and current plans and future forecasts. For most organizations, critical operational information is scattered across multiple technology systems, and lies trapped as unstructured data that resides on employee desktops, such as PowerPoint® or Microsoft® Word documents in email attachments, or even Web site links. As a result, gaining a true picture of your organization's health and overall performance at any given moment can prove disturbingly elusive, if not impossible. A unified business performance management (BPM) solution leverages a single database and architecture. This provides a single version of the facts. Since everything is managed via a single application, the display and communication of data is real-time - key to a truly unified approach. This unique leveraging of both structured data (database-driven) and unstructured data (employee-driven) ensures all relevant organizational knowledge is factored into the planning and performance management process. To enable this, accessibility is critical. A completely web-based application that leverages familiar, widely adopted technologies like Microsoft Excel and a standard web-browser provides this accessibility. This ensures that every manager, at all corporate levels, can use and access the application and be engaged in all facets of the BPM process. Full integration with Microsoft Excel and other standard tools and technologies ensures a level of corporate-wide adoption, ease of use, and accessibility that guarantees the product's acceptance and usability within the organization. This is central to enabling an optimal BPM strategy.
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A Unified Solution
One version of the facts A unified business performance management (BPM) solution leverages a single database and architecture. Since everything is managed via a single application, the display and communication of data is real-time - key to a truly unified approach. A centralized database for relational and multidimensional data ensures a level of integrity, consistency and manageability that far surpasses an "integrated" system typically requiring two or more databases. This provides the proverbial "single version of the facts" while eliminating the need for "data dumps" and batch transfers - enabling an optimal BPM strategy that delivers transparency and clear performance visibility. The ability to leverage both structured data (database-driven) and unstructured data (employee-driven) ensures all relevant organizational knowledge is factored into the planning and performance management process. To enable this, accessibility is critical. To ensure this accessibility, a completely web-based application that leverages familiar, widely adopted technologies like Excel and a standard web-browser (versus proprietary, non-web based applications) is necessary. This ensures that every manager, at all corporate levels, can use and access the application and be engaged in all facets of the BPM process. Factor in usability considerations (learning one application versus many), licensing and cost issues (the pain of buying one application versus many separate products), and overall system manageability (maintaining a single application versus multiple systems), and the benefits of a truly unified BPM solution are clear. Thus, an effective BPM strategy takes a proactive, unified approach to total business and enterprise management. Rather than requiring a collection of disparate applications, platforms, security requirements, and databases, a truly unified BPM solution calls for just a single one of each. This is the underlying difference between an integrated and unified approach to BPM. In summary, a unified BPM solution eliminates the need to purchase, deploy, learn and maintain multiple products from... [download for more]