Posts Tagged ‘ Business Performance ’

From the mid seventies we can note that scholars makes the distinction between small and large businesses in terms of needs, level of sophistication and range of strategic planning. Bracker and Pearson (1986), Rue and Ibrahim (1998), Perry (2001) and Wijewardena, Zoysa, Fonseka and Perera (2004) all formulate definitions of strategic planning which take the uniqueness of small businesses into account and allow for the fact that small businesses cannot draw on management and material resources in a manner similar to that of large organizations.

Empiric studies’ findings indicate at a correlation between strategic planning and performance. Nevertheless, the findings are mixed. A survey of twenty-six experimental studies enabled Miller and Cardinal (1994) to identify a significant positive connection between strategic planning and small business performance. Robinson (1982) found a significantly high level of profitability as well as an increase in sales and returns on sales and the number of full time employees in a group of small businesses that employed external consultants for the purpose of strategic planning. Compared with other businesses, Bracker and Pearson (1986) discovered a significant increase in income and remuneration per entrepreneur in businesses that prepared strategic plans (the highest of four designated levels of strategic planning). No significant increase was detected in the measure salary expenditure divided on the sum total of sales. A significant differentiation in the rate of sales increase was found by Rue and Ibrahim (1998) in small businesses that incorporated written planning (basic or sophisticated), as opposed to other businesses. Perry (2001) detected a significant differentiation in the degree to which planning was conducted in small businesses that did not applied for bankruptcy as opposed to those that did. Wijewardena et al. (2004) define three levels of planning: no written planning; basic planning; and detailed planning. The findings indicate that the level of planning stands in direct proportion to the level of increase in sales. Yusuf and Saffu (2005) classify three levels of planning: low; moderate; and high. A connection was found between increase in sales and the low level of planning. No correlation was found between strategic planning and increases in market share or in profitability.

Dr. Rami Schayek combining the academic world as a researcher and a lecturer at the ben gurion university with a field work as the CEO of several small businesses coincident with coaching many other small and medium businesses. You can see more from his work at www.small-medium-business.blogspot.com

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It has been said that money hides mistakes. Corporate profits are the market drops and gains triple digits for several days, house prices continue to fall and foreclosure rates are leaps and bounds. There is no question that we are in an uncertain economic environment. Are we in a recession right now, if not today, we are in one of the next week, or maybe slip next month? With the threat of economic uncertainty, many of our clients are asking: How should my firm position in the coming months? come

http://www.salesforce.pannipa.com/2009/10/sales-marketing-metrics-scorecards-improve-performance/

We are fast approaching the end of the first quarter. Today we are addressing a topic that just have the insight to uncover hidden faults and help you exceed your goals could include for 2008.

The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic management approach in the early 1990s, developed by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School, and Dr. David Norton.

Similar to the “balanced scorecard” of the 1990s, which focused on linking business performance metrics for the department to considerdeveloped with a “Sales and Marketing Metrics Scorecard” with a similar approach, but in today’s economy.

Today’s scorecard creates interaction and links between the five sales management pillars as a packaged team to drive performance to help.

Sale

– Marketing

– Strategy

– Operations / Development

– Partners / Alliances

First, create identifiable tactical measures for each of your sales team members and contributionDepartments. Then, we develop and you implement the scorecard into a living, breathing business tool to proactively manage and link strategy, marketing and sales.

This tool is one of the leading business driver that when used correctly, increases corporate cash flow, accelerates operational success, and enables companies to manage their business model by proactive metrics, not reactively by emotion.

With this connection, the scorecard provides clarity in strategic and tacticalGoals that are easily monitored to understand where the power comes from and where remedial attention is required. As I mentioned earlier, we are constantly asked about the best initiatives for the improvement made in this uncertain economy. We recommend that companies are always looking for sales metrics such as the ability to expand their business to discover the “hidden” error.

Go http://www.salesforce.pannipa.com/2009/10/sales-marketing-metrics-scorecards-improve-performance/

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With dashboards, scorecards and web- and Excel-based analysis capabilities, Cartesis Analytics combines intuitive visualization with powerful analysis to meet the diverse business performance management needs of executives, managers and operational users, all of whom need timely performance data in easy-to-digest formats to facilitate financial consolidation, planning, budgeting and forecasting.

A fully integrated component of the Cartesis 10 software suite, Cartesis Analytics shares a single database with Cartesis Finance and Planning applications and can access that database to pull in data from either application. There’s no wait, as Cartesis 10’s zero-latency capabilities deliver real-time business performance management data to Cartesis Analytics users, enabling earlier visibility into results, thus reducing closing and planning cycles. The suite’s financial intelligence ensures that conflicting data and other discrepancies, such as different currencies, are standardized so that users get consistent information in the manner that they expect.

Real-Time Analytics, Inside and Out

Cartesis Analytics offers a variety of drill-down and drill-through options as well as sophisticated exception monitoring to allow users to investigate business performance and identify specific organizational dynamics, trends and events and the drivers behind them. Business users can create Cartesis Analytics applications without IT intervention and access statutory, operational, financial and non-financial information including industry benchmarks.

“Traditional business intelligence software solutions provide scorecards and dashboards that let users observe the static, historical performance of their business,” said Crispin Read, CMO of Cartesis. “With Cartesis 10, if a user spots an unexpected condition, action is a mouse click away. If plans do not fit current business conditions, they can immediately be changed. If an entity submits new actuals during a financial close, they are available for analysis and re-forecasting in real time.”

In addition, Cartesis Analytics can be configured to access data sources outside of Cartesis applications. Companies can embed Cartesis Analytics within Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005. This flexibility and smooth integration allows users to remain within familiar working environments, promotes rapid adaptation, and encourages application use and collaboration with colleagues.

And as a result of Cartesis’ unique partnership with EDGAR Online, Cartesis Analytics customers can benchmark their own actual and forecast figures against competitive and peer-group BPM data. This enables them to identify areas where they are falling behind industry peers or competitors, such as revenue growth, gross profit margin, inventory turns, cash position and key ratios such as performance activity and liquidity.

“Most business performance management systems are too internally focused or are unable to deliver market data in real time to the people who need it as the basis for better decision making,” remarked Trevor Walker, vice president of marketing, Cartesis North America. “Cartesis Analytics puts this critical benchmarking data in the hands of users with the same rich set of features and zero latency with which it delivers internal data for true externally focused performance management.”

Dean Lombardo
business performance management

Is it really important to measure a business performance? I think if you will even need to purchase someone’s business, then you will never ask this question and the answer will be “Yes! Sure!”, because if you do not measure the performance of the business that you are going to purchase you will be going blind. Then why people don’t like to measure the performance of their own businesses?

When you are inside, you see a lot, I would say you can see to much business and business mechanism, you are flowed with unimportant data, you having too many things to care about and sometime you even don’t understand where this business is going. If you are a manager, then it is not a problem, but if you are CEO, then you have to think about things like this.

You will need some information diet, e.g. very limited information, which will tell you a lot about your business. There are different names for this diet, some call it balanced scorecard, another key performance indicators (KPI), also people are using “metrics” and “measures” to understand business better.

That’s great, but do we really know what we do? Once someone found a new type “diet” his is trying to use it for his business, but it is a wrong approach. Your business is different, there are departments, such as Sales, HR, Security, Financial. These departments function in a different ways and if you will apply the same information diet to all of them you will fail.

For instance, if you deal with Financial department and have to measure bank loans efficiency. What will you do? Will you be measuring customer satisfaction, growth opportunities and your ability to work with “internal process”? All these indicators means NOTHING! What is “customer satisfaction” for bank loan (if you are customer yourself) or if you are bank? You use this words, but you don’t want to detail them into some real-life metrics and indicators. That is the most important thing. I’d better have 6 bad indicators, that 60 great mission statements without any mean.

If you will ask me about performance and how to measure it, I will not answer you that you should measure customer satisfaction or bank’s loan financial aspect, I will answer you: “Give me metrics!”, “Give me indicators!”

What is bad, good and great performance indicator or metric? It is up to you and up to your business, but there are some common issues one must remember.

First, metric or indicator must measure. It should me math formula, equation, function. It must look like X = F(A1, A2, … An). Where A1-n is the number of indicators you must look at and the F is the function which tells what to do with indicators. X is the performance value.

What is bad indicator? It is when you tell, let’s measure customers’ satisfaction in bank loan niche. You don’t tell about what are you going to measure, how you are going to measure this, it’s not a metric, but it’s a good mission statement that tells about nothing.

What is great indicator or metric? It is the good metric (which we where talking above), but it is taken from some real-world business. So, it’s not just your idea or ideas of some reported from business magazine, it’s idea that works and it was checked by you. What you will need to do? You will need to pass it through you own business and optimize it to your business tasks. Work hard with business performance, and soon you will have a great business control tool.

To learn about measuring human resource performance, check Sam Miller new web-site.

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