Informative Speech On Business Performance Management

In the troubled days of economic crisis and recession the only way companies have to survive economic uncertainty is by making good use of business “performance management”.

Arguments

The decision making process used by companies has turned to have little, if none, value for the present situation of crisis that the business world is passing. The “old” way of conducting the companies is too bureaucratic and takes too much time to achieve conclusions. At the end, these conclusions and the decisions made for the future based on them may have no real effect on the business.

1. To assess the current situation of the company’s business employees collected feedback data from actual customers.

   1. Since all the customers, or at least most of them, must be contacted this step takes considerable amount of time and efforts.
   2. Since, also, new potential customers, or consumers should be surveyed, it takes even more time to complete.
2. The data collected is then classified, processed and analyzed and some conclusions were derived.

   1. This classification and processing period would be slow because a rush could bring errors of hurry and this would make the process useless.
3. These conclusions were then taken by the company’s management team.

   1. The management team uses the information analyses to make decisions about the future of the business.
   2. The problem is that for the humans (employees) to do all this job requires a lot of time and the decisions made at the end could not be useful in the market. So, this way of basing the decision making process of the company can be turned into a “harmful” way of doing business.

In this economic recession “harsh winter” the business survivors will be those who fully understand how their organization “tick” from the shop floor to the board level (Thompson, 2009).

1. A characteristic of such organisations is that they fully understand all parts of their business.

   1. This includes their different revenue streams, their staff, their customers and suppliers. A particular focus should be on how each business division is performing (Thompson, 2009).
2. By integrating the knowledge of their staff, their customers and suppliers, the business managers can make more appropriate decisions regarding the positioning of who, where, to do what, with what expectancies.

   1. This is traditionally called staff management. It means to get the adequate people at the right place, with the right capabilities to do the adequate job needed.
   2. This way the staff management is going to turn into a company’s problem solving issue and not an issue that is a problem to be solved itself (Hyslop, 2008).
3. By incorporating information regarding different revenue streams, customer satisfaction, customer reaction and consumer behavior, supplier demands, supplier satisfaction and credit terms, company managers have a clearer picture of the “outside source” events related to their business.

   1. This information is necessary in order not only to respond to the market fluctuations, but eventually to be prepared ahead of these market fluctuations.
   2. Especially in a time of crisis, this policy permits the company to avoid displeasing situations of consumers, customers, negative reaction toward a product or service the company is offering.
   3. Another unpleasant situation to be avoided would be the surpassing of the competition over your company’s goals or market share.

The future of business leading is that of putting more faith “in digitalization” of processes in decision making. The utilization of digitalized technology and new informative systems could be the key to move away fast from this “recession storm”.

1. After an adequate staff management and placement the most important “problem” to be solved is how to make more fast, while remaining reliable, the process of decision making.

   1. As described above the “traditional” process of decision making can be accurate but still is so slow that the market has changed way before you implement any policy.
   2. The responses are the latest informative technology solutions for managers called business intelligence (BI).
2. BI (business intelligence) is a broad category of technologies that allows for gathering, storing, accessing and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions.

   1. It is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring structured, domain-specific information (often stored in a data warehouse) to discern trends or patterns, thereby deriving insights and drawing conclusions.
   2. The BI process includes communicating findings and effecting change. BI domains include customers, products, services and competitors (Bates, 2009).
3. Its focus is on the processing of data. By processing data business intelligence can then be used for supporting decisions, forecasting future events or discovering trends within a set of information.

   1. But where does this information, this mountain of data, come from? It is no more than the raw numbers generated from the everyday activities that every business has. This is information that connects the supplier with the customer, consumer, through the business company.
   2. The main point is to analyze performance of the company, to watch the status of the supply and that of the demand and to try and find trends that can help predict future behaviors. This information is crucial especially to managers that take this information and determine the strategies and tactics that their company should implement in order to be ahead of the competition.
   3. This is why technology is so needed in processing fast the information. This is why business intelligence is essential if you want to launch new products or services in the market, change or modify the ones that you already have, understand what consumers want and suppliers can give.
4. This new technology allows for all of the work done by bureaucratic employees to be finished within short-limits of time and with the same accuracy, if not even better. The managers can program the technology in a way that it can by itself run patterns or prediction schemes of the market. But in the end, would be the managers themselves who will interpret the data and evaluate the predictions made by the software (Bates, 2009).

References

Thompson, M. (2009). Surviving economic uncertainty with corporate performance management. The Financial Times on-Line. Web.

Hyslop, M. (2008). A model to protect against emerging threats to business continuity.the Financial Times On-Line. Web.

Bates, J. (2009). A complex world requires ‘complex-capable’ technology. The Financial Times On-Line. Web.