Performance Management - an evaluation and comparison

Corporate Performance Management, sometimes referred to as Business or Enterprise Performance Management (or, more generally, as xPM) encompasses the relationships and processes that exist between strategic planning on the one hand and the tactical and day-to-day implementation of those plans on the other. These are related through measurement and monitoring and incorporate feedback from one level to another, both in financial and operational terms. xPM therefore incorporates both ‘hard’ measures such as sales, profits, budgets and other data; as well as ‘soft’ measures like competencies and skills that enable the fulfillment of tasks that support both short and log-term goals. xPM is the suite of applications that enable all of these elements to be tied to together to support the corporate vision in a holistic manner.

In technical terms, xPM as a whole consists of Financial Performance Management (budgeting, forecasting, planning, consolidation and so forth), Operational Performance Management, analytic applications, scorecarding and dashboards, and business intelligence capabilities though, arguably, it could also be extended to include such things as business activity monitoring (this is not included in this report), and these functions are supported by a variety of capabilities including business modelling, metric management, and guided analysis amongst others. In essence, all of these functions should come together to provide a single cohesive whole, though companies implementing xPM should be able to do so in an incremental fashion.

“There is no vendor in the market that provides all the capabilities outlined and suppliers tend to focus on one or more subsets of these requirements. This report discusses the issues and requirements involved in xPM, and compares the different vendor products where it is sensible to do so.

Suppliers whose products are considered in this report include Applix, Business Objects, Cartesis, Cognos, Corvu, DecisionPoint Software, ERP vendors (Oracle and PeopleSoft are taken as examples), Geac, Hyperion, Information Builders, InPhase, OutlookSoft, Rosetta Stone, and SAS.

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