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Recession Forces Businesses to Improve Processes and Intelligence
How do businesses react when a recession bites? They typically give a hard look to their business processes, and that is exactly what business have been doing over the last 18+ months.
The field of BPM, or Business Process Management, comes to mind when we start talking business processes, but some vendors are touting a different acronym the emphasizes the end result of improving business operations. They are calling it Enterprise Performance Management or EPM. And the goal is to achieve Management Excellence. EPM tries to optimize business processes and improve the quality of the data used when making business decisions. The six areas of a business that EPM breaks out for analysis are:
- stakeholder environment
- market model
- business model
- business plan
- business operations
- business results
Practitioners of EPM have tried to come up with a metric for measuring the success of a company in achieving good business performance. While very subjective, one metric sometimes used is to simply survey the level of confidence that managers in the organization express about company performance.
In a recent survey of managers, the confidence level index was measured and normalized to a scale of 0 to 10. The survey found that over the last year that the confidence Index jumped from a value of 5.13 a year ago to 7.04 now. The survey was taken in the US and Europe and based on 800 company executives. Based on that, some concluded that the effects of the recession are being seen and that many companies have made serious improvements in their processes and operations.
Some findings from the survey include:
- Most organizations are reporting overall improvement, but communication and interaction between different operation areas are still weak.
- More companies are now highly focused on achieving customer loyalty
- Most companies recognize Business Intelligence as a key reporting tool
