Performance management solutions built on Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities offer the tools that employees at all levels can use to make informed business decisions. When these decisions are aligned with your overall company strategy, you can increase business performance and achieve value-driven results. The following solutions can help your organization achieve first-rate business performance management.

In the traditional budgeting model, financial analysts have to retrieve information in different formats from disparate systems; consolidate the information in spreadsheets; and present it in various views for multiple stakeholders. The process is manual, time-consuming, confusing, and prone to error. Furthermore, it is a significant challenge to roll out budget templates and planning documents to the organization's line-of-business owners. More important, it's a challenge to roll up the completed budget documents in a way that is consistent, timely, rationalized, and supportive of strategic projections.

A budgeting, planning, and forecasting solution shows how organizations can use the familiar Microsoft Office system to automate financial data consolidation, roll up budgets and forecasts, improve business analysis, and provide timely, targeted reports to decision-makers. With Microsoft Office-based tools, budgeting can become part of a holistic planning and performance management system rather than a stand-alone activity.

Streamline processes

• Automated process distributes planning- and budgeting-related information throughout the organization.
• Corporate performance management tools synchronize and rationalize data aggregation.

Improve business insight

• Targeted scorecards, data visualization, and advanced analytic capabilities help people evaluate performance.
• The right information addresses immediate business needs.
• Timely and accurate data is delivered within familiar Microsoft Office tools.

Improve collaboration

• Centrally locate status, schedules, communication, and information-sharing.
• Automate workflows to assign tasks, manage budget creation, and monitor the status of submissions and approvals.

Foster compliance

• Centrally develop templates and models to help ensure accuracy and consistency in data collection.
• Manage approvals and data consolidation to track process history.
• Synchronize business models give a consistent organizational view.

When your employees have the tools to analyze historical data and produce forward-looking analysis, they can better plan, budget, and forecast in order to allocate resources and investments to the opportunities with the most potential. Microsoft BI capabilities can help your company increase its focus on business drivers and the creation of value through collective sharing of data. The benefits of using these capabilities include the following:

• Chief financial officers (CFOs) will have access to current budgeting and forecasting information to more effectively and accurately allocate resources and improve business operations. By standardizing and consolidating the data for financial reporting, budgeting and forecasting processes will be more efficient and less labor intensive. CFOs will also be able to ensure controls are in place to track industry auditing and compliance requirements.
• Vice presidents (VPs) of operations will have up-to-date information on capital investment expenses (planned versus forecast) and will be able to better monitor and adjust quarterly performance goals to support your organizational priorities. VPs will have increased access to information, such as initial forecasts, general analytics, and assumptions, which will help them to identify the root causes of issues and to plan execution of business strategies.
• Department managers and analysts will improve their decision-making capabilities by eliminating separately managed budgeting and forecasting processes and replacing them with a closed-loop planning, budgeting, and forecasting process. Department managers will be able to collaborate with other managers and executives to better predict trend patterns. Analysts will increase their productivity and focus more on analysis by reducing the time spent on setting up and formatting repetitive worksheets and formulas.

A strong understanding of internal and external market data is essential when launching new products, optimizing campaigns, and managing direct sales and channel strategies. The faster a marketing and sales organization can analyze data and make decisions, the better it can deliver products to customers and increase revenues and profits. Employees must be able to obtain consistent, relevant, and up-to-date marketing and sales data in order to analyze business performance and make fact-based business decisions.

Front-line employees such as sales managers and marketing managers need this information to be effective. However, companies often face several challenges in transforming data into powerful insights that drive more effective business decisions. It may be difficult to analyze and summarize customer information, and there may be limited information sharing between sales and marketing. The data may not be accurate, current, or relevant for role-specific information needs. This may limit the access and availability of relevant information to all levels and roles throughout an enterprise. Limited sharing and collaboration capabilities between sales and marketing can lead to missed cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Microsoft BI capabilities include tools, embedded BI functions, and centralized management features organizations can use to identify and act on sales and marketing data and opportunities earlier. These capabilities combined with the familiar Microsoft Office system environment and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 help employees get broader access to critical information.

Microsoft BI capabilities can help your organization access and analyze sales data to generate and share reports by providing the following:

• Expansion of the reach of analytics and decision-making capabilities
• Role-based sales and marketing performance reporting
• Detailed performance metrics

With Microsoft BI capabilities, companies can more efficiently analyze data and turn it into informed, strategic business decisions. The benefits of using these capabilities include the following:

• Sales managers will have increased access to information across their regions and will be able to collaborate with their teams more easily to improve customer targeting to generate new opportunities. They will be able to focus on specific sales force requirements to help overall sales performance and results. With the increase of usable information, regional sales managers will be able to better target and manage opportunities, allocate time for more profitable customers, and identify root causes of issues and resolve these in a more timely matter.
• Marketing managers will have the necessary information to effectively drive campaigns because of role-based data visibility. Teams can focus more on selling by decreasing time spent on data gathering and entry. They can be more effective in acquiring new customers, increasing the value of existing customers, and improving retention rates through better analysis of customer preferences. With stronger analytics of the customer and product information, they can plan new growth strategies and marketing campaigns more effectively.

Aligning project portfolios with organizational strategies is challenging when program managers do not have clear project-performance metrics. When performance metrics are unclear, employees may be confused by autonomous or ambiguous decision-making controls. As a result of these issues, strategic initiatives often fall short of expectations.

Centrally managed business performance and content management capabilities streamline project management by making it easier to generate project metrics. Program managers can then align project portfolios to your corporate strategy.

Microsoft BI capabilities help consolidate information, so information workers can track and measure their performance against company plans, objectives, and budgets by using key measures, personalized scorecards, and reports.

Microsoft applications can help your organization align, prioritize, and optimize investments by providing the following capabilities:

• Centralized resource management
• Multi-dimensional analysis and reporting
• Easy portfolio analysis, modeling, prioritizing, and optimization

With integrated tools that centralize resource management, all your workers can track and measure their performance against business objectives, which can help your company to achieve a higher return on capital and people investments. Managers can use key measures, personalized scorecards, and reports to rebalance and optimize the program portfolio to better align project activities with corporate strategy. The benefits of using Microsoft BI capabilities to align, prioritize, and optimize investments include the following:

• CEOs and CFOs will have increased visibility into crucial information to help ensure alignment of strategic objectives and spending for projects, programs, and portfolios. This means they can choose the best path for maximizing the return on business investments. Executives will also have streamlined project and portfolio management through centrally managed business insight and content management capabilities.
• Program management directors will have a centralized environment for creating portfolio priorities and sharing information with other business units. Directors will be able to better summarize information from several different perspectives with the use of standardized templates, collaboration tools, and a centralized repository.
• Employees will have self-service access to information and reports through dashboards, scorecards, and personalized portals. Empowering employees help them become more informed and responsive, so they are better able to make key decisions that align to the business strategy.

Performance management in operations tends to focus on reducing costs and improving efficiencies in new product development and core business processes such as inventory management, payroll and invoicing. Challenges today lie in optimizing and streamlining operational processes. Companies are confronted with poor visibility and insight into operations and limited access to important decision-making information. When visibility into processes and resources is lacking, companies are unable to respond quickly to customer needs and competitive challenges, adjust costs in a timely manner, or make the best investment decisions at the right times.

Addressing these challenges requires capabilities that integrate operational information sources with everyday tools that all decision makers use. Microsoft BI capabilities include a single source of operating information to provide a macro view into operations; role-specific roll-up reporting and analysis; and operations insight integrated into widely used productivity tools. Such a solution to improve operational insight can help your organization to monitor and track operations and the information required to make effective decisions by providing the following:

• Increased visibility into operations from a single source
• Integrated tools to enhance insight into operational performance
• Role-specific roll-up reporting and analysis

By implementing applications that deliver real-time information and that support daily operations and drive decisions, companies can improve productivity, maintain a competitive edge, cut unnecessary costs, and increase revenues. Microsoft technologies and applications have a wide user base, integrate well with businesses' infrastructures, and help businesses to take advantage of their current investments. The benefits of using Microsoft BI to improve operations include the following:

• Operations managers will have increased visibility into operational systems by having real-time access to the right information through centralized monitoring and reporting. They will be able to increase operational efficiencies, lower defect rates, and make real-time decisions with better overall project management.
• Chief Operating Officers will see reduced decision-making cycles and faster response times to customer needs, leading to increased revenues. They will also have improved capabilities to adhere to key standards and best practices.