3 Components of Effective Business Performance Management

What is Business Performance Management and how do we use it? 

Companies who monitor their processes, progress, and general output typically come out on top — by addressing pain points and adapting off the back of verifiable knowledge. As such, business performance management (BPM) is a critical tool that keeps companies ticking over. 

BPM software pools all the data derived from your operations, and turns it from a set of confusing numbers into actionable insights that can be tracked and reported on. This gives you a clear and accessible picture of your overall business performance — allowing you to see, at a granular level, what is working well and how processes could be more effective and efficient. 

Effective BPM is just that — the quick and concise collation of your data, formulated into actionable insights that are reported on from one, accessible platform. Not all BPM providers do this last part, Loop is leading the charge, taking insights and formulating them into recommended actions that drive commercial value. All the same, here, we’re going to break down the three components of BPM success, and what each stands to offer you.

Note: Business performance management (BPM) and “performance management” are not the same thing. The latter is more of a HR term that refers to the one-on-one analysis of employee performance at an individual level. The former uses data, action planning and reporting to holistically improve your overall business performance. 

Component 1: Straightforward and customisable KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are business gold. Unfortunately, countless companies fail to mine their potential, leaving flat, surface-level KPIs doing absolutely nothing for overall progression. For the most part, a lack of contextualised analysis or oversights of any kind is behind this failure. Meaning that while they can set goals, business leaders have absolutely no way of tracking their progress, or even beginning to understand what that information would mean. To make matters worse, enterprise-wide KPIs are typically implemented at ground level, passed to entire teams, and then left to drown unaccountably. 

In order to ensure comprehensive and effective business performance management, it’s fundamental to overcome this setback — making changes to the way you implement KPIs is your best shot. Specifically, assigning easy-to-access, straightforward actions at an individual employee level can provide the trackable accountability that turns information into action. By assigning these actions at an individual level and by tracking their success, you are best-placed to monitor the progress of your business-level KPIs, driving profitable enterprise-wide outcomes.  

Loop’s easy-to-use personal dashboards ensure you can do precisely this by consolidating your data into one accessible platform that your entire team can utilise — paired with an action planning centre that lets you assign actions to the areas and people that can drive forward KPI performance.

Key takeaways:

• As well as streamlining processes and increasing profits, well-implemented KPIs can provide much-needed business performance overviews.
• Dashboards are key to optimising KPIs from a BPM standpoint, providing simplified visualisations, individual assignment, and ultimate tracking oversight.
• As well as informing day-to-day decisions, readily available real-time performance data stands to inform enterprise-wide decisions that align goals with relevant metrics.
• Well-managed KPIs are key to effective BPM.

Component 2: Universalisable data access & collection — that is of a high-quality

In large part, effective BPM relies on executive omniscience. After all, if you don’t know what’s happening in every corner of your company, there’s no way you can set goals to meet every pain point — which is what BPM can realise for you.

Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, siloed information and operational processes are very much the spanner in the oversight works, preventing effective communication or understanding. Creating a universal foundation is the best way to overcome this, ensuring that you, and members of your team, can access data, insights, and ultimately decisions, across your entire business. 

Off the bat, this means doing away with convoluted manual processes in place of centralised systems that collate individual action reports, and company-wide goals, in one easy-to-access place. In particular, centralised data warehouses stand to streamline this collation, and provide BPM improvements that are easier than ever to manage. 

Loop was created with franchises in mind, meaning that our software certainly isn’t shy of siloed processes that need merging. Our platform bridges the gap between HQ, field teams and individual franchise locations, through a user-friendly interface that can scale with your business. All of your business levels get access to performance visibility in a centralised location, and the action planning capabilities to improve KPIs. This is BPM in a nutshell, served on one simple platter that you, and your team, can dip into. 

Key takeaways:

• Organisational omniscience is essential for inclusive, effective BPM.
• Siloed processes need removing to make that possible.
• Centralised data collation is the best way to make that happen.
• One-source data dashboards provide these benefits, removing convoluted manual processes, and allowing for business-omniscience through balanced scorecards that pave the BPM path.

Component 3: Strategic alignment and analysis

Business intelligence has always mattered for ensuring value, streamlining, and optimisation and, as big data continues to grow, the importance of business intelligence will keep soaring. Unfortunately, right now, 73.4% of companies see some setbacks with BI implementation, and these very setbacks often keep trackable goals on the backburner. 

This is because, much like data, business intelligence in a silo ultimately fails to create the results it predicts. This leaves BPM as out of reach as ever and is an issue that companies urgently need to address. Specifically, businesses can benefit from realising that not all BI is created equal. In fact, some information gives only a reliable idea of where your business stands in real-time, with no practical input or recommended action. 

By comparison, some BI stands to highlight how your company could work in the future. This is exactly what Loop offers, and it’s where real change can come into play. By collating BI with BPM, your business will be best-placed to adjust, align, and analyse the information on offer in line with your strategic business-level goals. Companies should be prioritising BI combined with BPM tools that work towards, not just insights, but actionable plans moving forward.

Actionable insights

If your datasets revolve around often out-of-context statements of fact, they act as a full stop on your efforts, rather than the start of a much-needed conversation. As well as being entirely useless, this information is, in large part, untrackable and unmanageable. 

Instead, companies need software backing both their BI and PM efforts, creating overall BPM best practices, highlighting statistics for what they offer, and also contextualising that information without your business framework. These ‘actionable insights’ both stand to improve overall business operations, and offer a trackable, verifiable path towards your business performance goals. This, especially when paired with our other components, makes it easier to manage your business and create more profitable outcomes at long last. 

Suggested reading: For more information on how to understand actionable insights, check out our blog — What Are Actionable Insights? Buzzword or Important for Business? 

BPM keeps you in the Loop

The ability to set goals has always been a business prerequisite but, too often, business goals have faded into an unmanageable ether, keeping companies from reaching their potential, and preventing them from ever understanding why. By combining the perfect amounts of BI and PM, BPM stands to keep managers and employees on the same page, or in the loop, with regards to goals at any given time. 

Most importantly, actionability and strategic alignment delivered through a single tool can increase your efficiency, improve analysis, and bring business goals within reach. This is the crux of effective BPM, and it’s a benefit that Loop easily offers with the backing of one-source dashboards, action planning, and balanced scorecards. Ultimately, these services cover the component parts of BPM through:

1. Revolutionised KPIs
2. Real-time accessibility 
3. Ultimate actionability

With these boosts behind you, you can bet that business goals, and the ways in which you implement them, will have never looked better.