If the claims are true, corporate performance management (CPM) could be the equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone for business intelligence (BI), the catalyst for turning raw corporate data into meaningful insight, helping to inform high-level decision making and refining business processes.

One of the CPM converts is Mark Bodger, professional services director at BI consultancy ICit. He believes he has seen the evidence to back up the bold claims being made about CPM.

Toiletries manufacturer PZ Cussons, famed for its Imperial Leather soap, bought into CPM to such an extent that its executives restructured their IT system around it.

Previously, Cussons had operated across the globe, pooling information from disparate and geographically spread enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, several of which were the result of acquisitions and which were at times not integrated with its own main business applications. Interrogating those systems was problematic.

And in the face of this complexity, the company was under increasing pressure from supermarkets in different geographies to provide sophisticated itinerary and pricing information.

Meanwhile, the executives board was struggling to achieve a view of the business as a whole – which in turn impaired its ability to accurately budget and plan the deployment of financial resources. “Cussons’ Global Decision Support [group] just couldn’t get the information they needed,” explains Bodger.

Cussons’ executives embarked on a CPM strategy – one not dissimilar to a typical BI project, where data extracted from ERP systems populates a data warehouse, which is then subject to complex querying, analysis and data modelling.

But the way the fruits of this analysis were delivered to the workforce was innovative: the company rolled out a network of portals, each tailored to particular staff roles, which were accessed on thin client terminals. This made the CPM implementation not just a useful application, but a central pillar of the working lives of Cussons’ employees.

The move to thin clients was unpopular among some staff, unhappy with the removal of what Bodger describes as “non-core applications”. But personalised BI portals ensured that employees had access to “the right information and the right tools” to do their jobs.

“This was the first time I’d seen performance management being central to the IT strategy,” says Bodger.

CPM pays off

Elsewhere, global holiday accommodation network Cendant, has also used CPM to radically improve its contract negotiation process.

Cendant’s customer-facing employees are reliant on having exhaustive information about properties and local market trends to hand when negotiating prices. But that level of detail was hampered by the number of potential sources of data – again many of which were the result of acquisitions.

“Cendant’s success is dependant on marketing the right property at the right time,” says Bodger.

Cendant’s management initiated a data unification project, where it quickly became apparent that there was huge variation in data definitions. By extracting data from transactional systems and migrating it into a data warehouse, Cendant’s IT team could then overlay a common metadata schema, ensuring that the data warehouse became the principal source for definitions.

This was a crucial step in providing quality data to populate the CPM system, says Bodger. Businesses need a clear process for cleaning data, he says; having a management champion to drive this through the rest of the organisation is also essential.

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