Corporate Performance Management:
More than ever, companies are challenging their CFOs to move beyond traditional administrative functions and take a leadership role in driving strategy and improving business performance. Why? Because leaders who understand what’s driving financial performance at any point in time can make more calculated decisions about how best to marshal their resources. With the right data, performance management tools, and resources, they can improve operational efficiency, ensure regulatory and statutory compliance, and ultimately control performance for maximized profitability.
However, prevailing approaches to managing corporate performance offer limited opportunities to deliver business value beyond basic transaction processing and reporting. Applications and technology that exist in their own silos impede enterprise-wide visibility into performance. That makes it hard to integrate corporate and departmental planning, model cost scenarios, and determine operational budgets based on strategic plans and assumptions. Even after consolidating data, few CFOs have the tools they need for predictive analysis and calculated decision making based on a good understanding of potential risk. And then there’s the challenge of aligning operational plans, resources, and people across the organization to drive execution of corporate strategy.
Close the Gap with SAP® Solutions for Performance Management
SAP® solutions for performance management provide a single, integrated solution that lets you carry out the full life cycle of corporate performance management activities – defining strategy and managing execution aligned with corporate goals; budgeting, planning, and consolidation; and modeling and optimizing profitability. The software improves transparency and insight into corporate performance, enhances forward-looking decision making, and enables timely, strategy-aligned actions by individuals across your organization. Now you can take control over performance with software that allows you to do the following.
Empower All Stakeholders
With SAP solutions for performance management, all stakeholders are productive from day one. They can use familiar Microsoft Office tools and innovative productivity features such as business process flows that guide them through predefined standard processes. Intelligent action panes help them with activities based on the current task at hand. This minimizes training and ramp-up and ensures that tasks are performed correctly.
Adapt to Change Swiftly
You can empower every stakeholder at every level to communicate, collaborate, and execute on a commonly understood and defined action plan and budget – and adjust it as necessary. Patent-pending visualizations facilitate adoption and understanding of strategy, and intelligent exception management proactively identifies potential risks. By synchronizing goals with initiatives, priorities, measures, people, incentives, resources, and budgets, your organization can readily adapt to change.
Predict Profitability Outcomes
You gain a complete understanding of the drivers of profitability. Equally important, the software automatically analyzes data and proactively delivers critical information such as root-cause analysis. This can help you assess and understand what’s happened in the past and make risk-adjusted plans that improve future performance.
The solutions are also unique in that they support holistic financial management, which is increasingly important for CFOs. Specifically, all of these corporate performance management solutions can be integrated with the SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance, as well as the SAP ERP Financials solution, the foundation for enterprise financial management. SAP ERP Financials is built on the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, which leverages enterprise service-oriented architecture to tie people, processes, and information seamlessly together. This integrated technology platform enables SAP solutions for performance management to embed industry-specific content and analysis directly into core applications and processes. You’ll have the insight and tools you need to craft effective strategies, as well as unprecedented abilities to deliver that information to your frontline workers when they need it – in context.
Use a Holistic, Iterative Approach to Controlling Performance
SAP solutions for performance management encompass a modular set of applications that cover the full life cycle of financial management – and put you in control of performance.
Strategize and Prioritize
The SAP Strategy Management application helps both line managers and corporate executives drive strategic execution in the planning process. By clearly linking strategic plans to initiatives, targets, performance measures, and people, you can set clear priorities and tasks that employees at all levels can act on with confidence. Specifically, the software supports strategy development by helping you transform written plans (which are typically static and impenetrable) into living documents, so you can define, discuss, share, and update goals with employees.
