More than Just a Dashboard

Look under the hood to see why SAS is a leader in performance management

by Jim Davis

Let's talk honestly about performance management. Whether you call it corporate performance management (CPM), business performance management (BPM) or enterprise performance management (EPM), the overall goals are the same.

Performance management involves aligning business and IT processes and linking tactical operations with strategic goals. It is a continuous, enterprisewide process that identifies opportunities for strategic improvement across an organization. Most importantly, its goal is to improve the performance of the whole enterprise by facilitating the free flow of information and aligning employees' activities toward overall corporate goals.

Competitors like Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos may have performance management front ends with all the bells and whistles – including bar charts, traffic-lighting reports and fuel-tank displays – but are their underlying analytics good enough to support decisions? Not without platform technologies that provide consistent information, facilitate discovery and provide foresight about the future.

Why? Because performance management is more than just a dashboard or scorecard. It involves multiple technologies, processes and methodologies working together to present a complete picture for strategic change in an organization.

Data integration, intelligent storage, predictive analytics and robust reporting are all necessary ingredients for a successful performance management solution. With SAS, you get all of these pieces – and much more – in one solution and from one vendor.

Taking a holistic approach, SAS helps optimize business performance through SAS intelligence solutions – including financial, customer, risk and IT intelligence solutions that are powered by the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

SAS Performance Management integrates the SAS intelligence solutions with strategy, planning and finance – and provides a clear vision for greater efficiency and effectiveness, a common base of knowledge and understanding throughout the organization, and a clear plan for success that spreads to all levels of the company.

In this issue, executives at the University Hospital Aachen(UKA) explain how SAS Performance Management offers internal efficiencies, improves resource management, reduces debt servicing and brings many other financial benefits as well.

In fact, executives in many industries are achieving strategic goals by focusing their entire organizations on the initiatives and indicators that support those goals:

• Federal agencies are using SAS Performance Management to ensure low costs and high levels of efficiency, and to adopt new strategies that focus on customer and employee satisfaction.
• Large financial institutions are using it to create coherence between the overall objectives of every division – including sales, marketing, HR, finance and risk.
• Manufacturing leaders are using it to develop and implement sound corporate plans for profitability and growth – by aligning plants and distribution facilities around the world with the same corporate goals.

Regardless of the industry, SAS Performance Management meets unique business needs with industry expertise and cross-functional solutions built on one common platform. Leveraging the analytics in the SAS platform, SAS Performance Management also offers powerful predictive capabilities, so organizations can forecast strategic business needs.

With SAS Performance Management, companies can easily connect directly to the operational system infrastructure, formulate and communicate strategic goals across the enterprise, align resources, predict future performance, and effectively execute strategies to manage tomorrow's performance today.

Bio: Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for SAS, provides strategic direction for SAS products, solutions and services. Davis is co-author of the new book, Information Revolution: Using the Information Evolution Model to Grow Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005).