I was just relaxing a little bit from another long day at the client site when I saw this movie on YouTube. In my opinion the movie really shows the bottlenecks within an organization with respect to performance management.
Enjoy!
I just saw this press release. Things are changing in the CPM market. First was the takeover of Hyperion by Oracle and now the takeover of OutlookSoft by SAP.
The press release can also be found at http://www.outlooksoft.com/news_events/press_releases/2007/sap.htm
Walldorf, Germany and Stamford, CT—May 8, 2007
Extending its leadership in delivering complete solutions for the CFO, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced its intention to acquire OutlookSoft Corporation, a privately held provider of integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software. Today’s announcement marks another milestone in SAP’s multi-year plan to holistically address the increasingly sophisticated requirements of the CFO around driving business performance, managing risk, ensuring compliance and spearheading financial transformation in their organizations. In making the announcement, SAP stated that the acquisition is expected to be completed in June 2007, pending approval from the respective antitrust authorities. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
CFOs today face increasing pressure to meet regulatory requirements and drive efficiencies while at the same time playing a strategic role in driving the growth and profitability of the business. SAP’s build/partner approach, supplemented by strategic “fill in” acquisitions, has enabled CFOs to benefit from the most comprehensive, integrated set of financial business processes. Building upon the market-leading, cross-industry financial applications suite within SAP ERP, CFOs can ensure business compliance and manage risk with integrated governance, risk and compliance management applications (SAP solutions for GRC) and improve their business performance linking strategy to execution with risk-adjusted planning and corporate performance management (SAP solutions for performance management). The transaction with OutlookSoft is continuing evidence of SAP’s strategy to use well-placed acquisitions to complement its broad solution offering by gaining innovative technologies, while maintaining its successful organic growth track record.
“Across industry segments and global markets, CFOs are under tremendous pressure to improve business performance, predictability and stakeholder confidence,” said Doug Merritt, corporate officer and member of the Executive Council, head of Business User Development, SAP AG. “Leading companies are looking to establish unified, easy-to-use best practice business processes that enable a predictive and risk-adjusted approach to performance. OutlookSoft completes another key component of our multi-year strategy to build, partner and acquire unique offerings for CFOs, a strategy based on thorough market analysis and customer input. OutlookSoft brings the people, intellectual property and expertise that will enhance the SAP business user experience and add value for a strong cross-section of our customer base.”
OutlookSoft InnovationRecognizing customers’ needs for an innovative new approach to performance management, OutlookSoft was founded in 1999 to deliver the standard for next-generation solutions based on unprecedented ease-of-use for the business user and unified experience across all performance management processes. OutlookSoft focused on this vision by modernizing solutions for the CFO leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to enable collaboration across the enterprise and delivering real-time, predictive analytics capabilities and finance-ready business process flows, an extensible library of procedures guiding business users through all performance management activities and facilitating collaboration.The company’s vision has been validated by more than 700 customers globally, a record year in 2006 with 25 percent revenue growth and an unprecedented win-rate against its competitors with the latest availability of OutlookSoft 5. OutlookSoft’s singular commitment to the CFO, its deep domain knowledge and its vision for next-generation performance management solutions clearly complements SAP’s core expertise in integrated financial applications and strengthens the company’s strategy to effectively address the increasingly complex requirements of the finance organization.
OutlookSoft’s modern, standards-based solution is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), thus enabling customers to take advantage of OutlookSoft 5 and extend the value of their SAP solutions by leveraging integration with SAP’s service-enabled applications via a common technology platform, SAP NetWeaver. In particular, SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI), with over 14,000 installations, will provide the robust BI infrastructure powering the OutlookSoft 5 application and deliver a common user experience to the business user.“From the beginning, OutlookSoft has focused on helping business users, the executive team and, most importantly, the CFO,” said Phil Wilmington, president and CEO, OutlookSoft. “Our solution unifies organizations, disparate systems and processes through innovative technology and accessibility to information. This is an exciting time for our customers and partners, as we combine the business process expertise and technology platform from SAP with the usability and deep functionality of OutlookSoft’s performance management application.”
About OutlookSoft Headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, OutlookSoft employs approximately 250 people and has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and Italy. For additional recent news about SAP’s solutions for the CFO, please visit: http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7596.
About SAPSAP is the world’s leading provider of business software*. Today, more than 39,400 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP® applications—from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small businesses and midsize companies to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver® platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol “SAP.” (Additional information at http://www.sap.com).
Integration: “Talking the same language”
Performance management is all about the successful execution of strategy. We identify four guiding principles to translate strategic directives into an effective performance management cycle. In part I and II we discussed focus and alignment. In this post we want to discuss the third principle which is integration: talking the same language.
Integration is about three main ideas:
To link performance management processes, the first step is to define and describe these processes. This is relatively straight-forward to do. For each process and sub-process, define inputs and outputs, interdependencies among processes and process steps. For each process and process step, responsibility should be assigned to individual employees. To achieve linkage, the planning and reporting process needs to be integrated with people performance management and goal setting in terms of timeline, process steps and content.
The next step in integration is developing the right technology infrastructure. Technology needs to be supportive to the value model, management control structure and processes defined earlier (see part I and II).
To provide a solid foundation, the first step here is to define the enterprise information model based on information requirements to support key decisions across all major business dimensions. The enterprise information model is used to identify and implement an IPM specific toolset (this can be an ERP or best-of-breed solution). IPM tools and requirements need to be integrated into the overall IT strategy & architecture.
The most challenging part in integration is establishing rewards and incentives supportive of the performance management system. It requires establishing a framework for rewarding performance, and ensuring that the framework for rewards and incentives is linked to the planning, measuring and intervention processess.
This starts with establishing a common understanding of "performance" including functional differences and providing a framework to define individual performance expectations to individual employees. Furthermore, managers need to be provided the tools and processes enabling them to appraise performance according to individual performance expectations. Finally, reward must be linked to both achievement of corporate strategic goals and individual performance.
In the last post in this serie we will elaborate on the last remaining guiding principle for successful strategy execution: behaviour.
