In this roller-coaster economy, process inefficiencies will accelerate a company's downfall. If business processes—the combination of personnel, production equipment, procedures and technologies—aren't optimized, a host of inefficiencies will leave a sinking feeling in every executive's stomach.

Two plus years of economic weakness, plus accounting scandals, have led most organizations to seek ways to better measure and monitor their financial performance. As a result, a strategic approach called Business Performance Management (BPM) or Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is attracting lots of attention. It could boost your organization's return on investment by double digits.

As explained by Mark Smith, SVP Research & CEO of the Ventana Research consulting firm in Belmont, Calif., BPM involves monitoring the performance of the entire organization and managing it by using the company's assets optimally to achieve a common set of goals and objectives. In that way the enterprise will be able to improve efficiency, manage costs, and sharpen its focus on revenue opportunities—all key steps to improving competitiveness and profitability.

To deliver an effective unified view, BPM includes a single view of all relevant data related to the following corporate functions:

Creating that single view is considerably easier to say than to do. A system to make this possible must allow views into a single, integrated pool of enterprise information from the many perspectives of different stakeholders, while supplying each with the information they need to make the right choices.

Many of the individual tools in the performance management suite have existed for years—it's the integration that's new. Existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems create and gather the transaction and payroll data. Meanwhile, online analytical processing (OLAP) software has been used for more than a decade to analyze sales data. It is now folded into a broader technology category called Business Intelligence (BI).

A combination of BI tools, ERP systems and standards make it easier for organizations to integrate, analyze and distribute data from these disparate sources. The goal is to produce accurate reports about the performance of an organization in real time. BPM implementations convert transactional and production data into high level performance metrics, such as ROI, ROA, sales per employee, etc.

Knitting together BI and ERP systems to produce real BPM insights is not easy. Such systems are large, complex, and require substantial resources to deploy. Nonetheless, it is worth the effort, especially these days.

The Gartner Group recently predicted, for example, that enterprises without comprehensive analytics and benchmarking tools to manage business process will experience at least a 25 percent lower return on investment on supply chain projects than enterprises with mature capabilities in these areas.

For more information about ERP and BI systems, visit http://www.EnterprisesoftwareHQ.com. It has a detailed listing of IFS, SAP, SAS Institute and other relevant vendors, and their products. In addition, you can review thousands of functions now provided by ERP and BI software vendors to determine which ones would be useful for your organizations' BPM efforts.