How companies improve their performance management

Planning, forecasting and reporting are the decisive levers for the performance management of companies. This is the result of the BARC study “Boosting Finance Productivity with Unified Performance Management”. It is based on a global survey of the measures that companies use to improve their performance management and the challenges that need to be overcome.

Planning is an elementary factor in corporate management

What is performance management?

(Corporate) performance management comprises processes that support companies in managing and monitoring their performance and increasing effectiveness and efficiency. The aim of performance management is to align corporate strategy and objectives with business processes. In this way, companies improve their competitiveness and profitability – at a strategic, tactical and operational level. Various methods, key figures, tools and processes of corporate management are brought together to form a coherent overall picture.

In an increasingly complex and volatile world, high-quality data and reliable insights are essential for better decisions. With the help of standardized performance management, decision-makers are able to access relevant information more quickly and gain an edge over the competition.

Planning, forecasting and reporting as decisive levers

In order to meet increasing demands and provide useful data for management, companies are striving to continuously optimize their performance management from a business and technological perspective. In this context, business planning, forecasting and reporting are of central importance for corporate management. When asked about the key processes for performance management in the BARC study, the topics of “financial planning and forecasting” (54%), “operational planning and forecasting” (46%) and “internal reporting and analysis” (40%) were mentioned most frequently.

Challenges in corporate management

Only 4% of companies currently have no challenges in performance management. The biggest obstacles to its optimization are the enormous manual effort and lack of automation (41%), the lack of consistent data sets for decisions (39%), the lack of integration of processes in performance management (37%), the lack of resources (37%) and insufficient software support (26%).

Advantages of optimized performance management

If the various elements of performance management can be harmonized, companies will benefit from a number of advantages. These include a significant reduction in effort (48%), improved data quality (45%), acceleration of tasks and processes (43%), higher quality and accuracy of decisions (42%) and faster delivery of information to decision makers (38%).

The right software support is essential for excellent performance management and optimized processes. Companies still have a lot of catching up to do in this respect, as many still mainly rely on Microsoft Excel. However, it is also clear that a sustainable improvement in performance management can only be achieved with a holistic approach that focuses equally on business, process and technological aspects.