Strategic Business Performance Management

Winners of the 2002 Vision Awards for Excellence in Business Performance Management share their budgeting, planning and reporting innovations.

It's more than a process.

That's the consensus on business performance management (BPM) among the judges of the 2002 Business Finance/Hyperion Vision Awards. It also happens to be one of the first points this year's crop of winners emphasize when identifying the key elements of their BPM initiatives. They use performance management systems to realize strategic benefits: Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. gains greater insight into project performance (among other major wins); Covenant Healthcare System Inc. aligns its strategic, financial and capital plans; Zebra Technologies Corp. analyzes revenue trends and uses that information to make quick decisions; and Spray Equipment & Service Center Inc. optimizes work force productivity based on its analysis of revenue streams.

"Top performers demonstrate the ability to identify the true performance drivers, which allows them to report on information that is the most important rather than reporting on all possible performance measurements," notes Vision Awards judge Cody Chenault, director of The Hackett Group, an Atlanta-based company that provides best-practices research to corporate clients. "The difference in approaches is the ability to more quickly automate and disseminate information. And finance actually adds more value by helping operations rationalize and synthesize what is most important. Average performers tend to associate the bulk of metrics with value, and they spend a lot of time in delivering. Top performers also deliver information electronically in a dynamic manner, as opposed to paper or e-mail attachments."

"The common themes and keys to success for the winners include short reporting and budgeting cycles and a wide breadth of performance metrics -- financial, quality, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and productivity -- that were driven based on the strategic goals of these organizations," reports John O'Rourke, senior director of product marketing with Hyperion Solutions Corp. in Stamford, Conn. "The winners also received high end-user satisfaction ratings, demonstrating that they are tuned to the needs of their decision-makers and are responding well to those needs."