Businesses are increasingly looking toward corporate performance management (CPM) in order to understand the organisation. CPM is about attaining competitive advantage through creating a comprehensible knowledge base from which to map future plans and measure performance and execution across the enterprise. Business processes form the foundation of successful CPM.
In establishing business process, best practice must be applied or developed. Businesses are faced with a build or buy dilemma as a surfeit of these methodologies already exist as part of the intellectual property of vendors and researchers. Compelling reasons to look at the `buy` rather than `build` scenario include cost and man-hour implications, time to implementation and ROI.
"When considering a time saving of approximately 570 man days on implementation with the purchase of a `best practice` solution, the answer is simple," adds Christo Nel, pre-sales product manager at Cognos. "It is tried and tested and it works."
"The `discovery` phase of a CPM implementation often includes a lengthy process of establishing and redefining business processes. This more than often results in an implementation that can take up to 12-15 months. In elapsed time this equates to approximately 600 man days, which contributes significantly to the total cost of ownership of a CPM solution," notes David McWilliam, managing director at Cognos SA.
Cognos recognised the need for a set of pre-defined best practices and undertook the task of commissioning various solution partners to compile typical business questions and identify best business practices. The company interviewed different business areas within its `Top 1 000` customers and established over 3 500 business questions.
Extensive research gave rise to Cognos` range of six Performance Applications, a suite of solutions that comprises more than 30 key areas of analysis and uses more than 500 key performance indicators (KPIs). These solutions meet best practice business requirements around customer, financial and supply chain analytics.
The process of creating Performance Application solutions starts from a business perspective and maps business processes to technology. These solutions deliver the benefits of built-in business value, a production-ready architecture and, most importantly, accelerated time to results with SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards (now part of PeopleSoft) and SSA enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions .
Says Nel: "Clients already have a wealth of data within existing ERP solutions. What is key to CPM is being able to extract best practices or take the `golden nuggets` out of an ERP solution and extend the value of the information from of these systems."
A strategic view across the enterprise that reflects business process must also be created. Processes are usually `interlinked` across an organisation through customers, sales, materials and other business elements. Having a range of solutions that offer a framework of best practices across multiple business areas provides the platform for a strategic view across the enterprise, allowing for the analysis of business performance across the business value chain.
Inaccurate information will provide inaccurate insight into the organisation and its performance, rendering the CPM solution ineffectual. Pre-built connectors in Performance Applications vastly improve the accuracy of information and improve data integrity, accuracy and quality, providing a `single version of the truth` that is consistent across the enterprise.
McWilliam concludes: "Before embarking on a CPM implementation, take the time to ensure the foundation is in place to leverage the competitive-edge of a well-planned and powerful business solution with built-in best practices. In addition to leveraging these benefits, pre-defined business processes will significantly impact the cost of a CPM solution beyond the initial purchase, providing a faster return on investment and solid groundwork to steer the business toward profitability.
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