Performance Management

Performance management refers to how an organization leverages its assets (people, money and technology) to achieve short-, medium- and long-term strategic goals. Through an approach intended to improve value creation, performance management requires you to:

• Control cost without sacrificing future growth objectives: Given the nature of current incentives (meeting quarterly or annual targets), the challenge is to meet short-term targets while preserving strategic growth initiatives.
• Understand what drives cost and profit (or value): Without this understanding, managers are unlikely to allocate resources appropriately and know where to make improvements. At best, it may generate suboptimal results; at worst, it could inadvertently and irreparably destroy value.
• Improve agility: Organizations that can identify opportunities and threats more easily than their competitors, understand the implications, update strategy quickly and then execute that strategy consistently across the organization will be the winners.
• Identify and respond to environmental, social and economic risks and opportunities: A focus on the "triple bottom line" of people, profit and planet drives increased brand value through innovation, improves internal efficiencies and accountability, and engenders the loyalty of consumers, employees and other stakeholders.

How SAS Can Help

SAS helps organizations improve performance by focusing on accountability, culture toward measurement and transparency. SAS delivers performance management software and services to help executives:

• See a clean and simple reality. Ensure data quality, transparency and relevance for action.
• Manage and align resources (people, money and technology) to strategy. Understand how cost and value flow through the organization and what drives or influences variation.
• Improve foresight and optimize value. Prove which KPIs drive strategy; forecast and predict future outcomes with accuracy; and optimize resources and activity for maximum value creation.
• Learn, share, codify and adapt. Understand why things succeed or fail, and update and communicate strategic change quickly and consistently for improved agility.
• Evolve through experimentation and innovation. Simulate and plan options based on facts, not intuition, and prove which options deliver the best balance of risk and reward.

Through implementing SAS for Performance Management at more than 1,500 customer sites, we've learned that more than 80 percent of engagements start with creating transparency. Get it right and companies adopt a more positive culture toward measurement, which in turn improves accountability. Only then can employees act on facts, not gut instinct, improving resilience and consistency.

Related Products

With all SAS for Performance Management solutions, SAS provides the capability to organize and cleanse your data as a critical first step. Many organizations then focus on the financial aspects of budgeting and planning and move on to strategy management applications. Others focus on understanding what drives value. To help you improve your organization's performance, SAS provides an intertwined set of solutions:

• Dashboards and scorecards.
• Financial consolidation, budgeting, planning and reporting.
• Cost and profitability analysis.
• IT resource management.
• Customer and supplier intelligence.
• Enterprise risk management.
• Sustainability management.
• Advanced analytics.

How SAS Is Different

• Performance management is a journey with multiple phases. Many vendors focus on surfacing historical information allowing organizations to see what's happened in the past, and then manage and report on performance. SAS goes further to help you improve, learn and evolve based on facts, not intuition.
• Our solutions are built on a common, scalable platform – the SAS Business Analytics Framework – to address your end-to-end process. With SAS, you can start with a single solution and evolve at a pace that suits your needs.
• Our solutions are complemented by our ability to quantify and predict the influence of process standards and quality; effectiveness of strategy; market and economic trends; and customer and supplier behavior. As a result, you'll get unsurpassed insight into what truly drives value.
• SAS is database/ERP-neutral and is viewed by the analyst community as visionary in performance management – particularly when it comes to advanced analytical approaches, strategy management and cost/profitability optimization.