Business Performance Management

Term Definition
Business Performance Management (BPM) or Corporate Performance Management (CPM) is a term that is used to describe the methodologies, processes or workflows, metrics and systems that an organization uses to manage and optimize business performance. Business Performance Management also refers to robust software applications that enable the data collection, reporting and execution of the components of business performance management.

Business Performance Management is focused on business processes such as planning and forecasting. It helps organizations discover efficient use of their business units, financial, human and material resources. It involves consolidation of data from various sources, querying, and analysis of the data, and then putting the results into practice. Continuous and real-time reviews help to identify and eliminate problems before they grow. BPM's forecasting abilities help the company take corrective action in time to meet earnings projections. Forecasting is characterized by a high degree of predictability, which is put into good use to answer what-if scenarios. BPM is useful in risk analysis and predicting outcomes of merger and acquisition scenarios, and coming up with a plan to overcome potential problems. Business Performance Management provides key performance indicators (KPI) that help companies monitor efficiency of projects and employees against operational targets.

Organizations have begun to make data more readily available and as such tools facilitate the work. Common tool categories of a business performance management system include:

• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• data warehouses
• document warehouses
• text mining
• data mining
• BPM
• Scorecarding
• dashboarding and data visualization
• executive information systems
• decision support systems
• management information systems

Business Performance Management software provides a range of functionality around business intelligence that benefits organizations. These systems promote greater visibility and effectively align employee goals and corporate strategies. BPM integrates the company's processes with customer relationship management or Enterprise Resource Planning. Companies become able to gauge customer satisfaction, control customer trends and influence shareholder value.

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