Unified performance management goes beyond the surface-level "integration" of corporate data that is common among today's BPM applications; it provides detail on the business at every level. For example, sales forecasts are fine at the high level; they may suffice for top executives' needs. But elsewhere in the company are managers who need to know how the company expects to actually sell that much. A number of subprocesses are necessary to the development of an actionable sales forecast: You need to establish your sales unit forecast. You need to compare your current sales programs with previous programs and optimize the mix. You must consider the promotions which drive the details of channel, SKU, store, and brand. The production department needs to match the sales unit forecast in their planning process. Transportation and logistics must be aligned. And, finally, the supply chain logistics will have to support the production goals. Sales planning therefore must drive trade promotion funding, trade promotion planning and optimization, manufacturing resource planning, supply chain, and transportation and logistics. The sales plan needs to be distributed with the right level of detail so that everyone in the organization knows what needs to be done.

All of the necessary actions can be taken in a company without a unified performance management system; the question is whether they will be collaborative, efficient, and aligned with corporate strategy. Consider a company that is planning a product rollout. It needs to calculate not only the financial plans (i.e., direct costs and revenue) and the overall project plan, but also deeper sets of detail: How much of the marketing budget will be needed to promote the new product? How much product will be delivered to each distribution channel, each retailer, and each store? When will the product arrive in each location, and with what frequency will stock be replenished? These very detailed plans can be created directly in the company's ERP, manufacturing, and CRM systems, but keeping them separate impairs communication among the people involved in the different activities related to the product launch. If the planning were done within a unified performance management system instead, data would flow from the high-level plans into the execution systems and back up into the performance management system seamlessly.

Execution and monitoring. The value of unified performance management comes into full realization during the monitoring phase of strategy execution. That's because even the best-laid plans must react to market realities. Managers can react only if they know what's happening, and how that differs from their planned outcomes, at a meaningful level of detail. Variance analysis is the key starting point for performance analysis. Which store sold less than expected? Which SKU was the underperformer? Finding the true causes of variances requires digging into data outside the realm of what's typically considered performance information. A business facing a shortfall in one area may need to look at things like which suppliers are providing raw materials to which factory, or whether humidity affects output.

Consider the case of a manufacturer that tracked details about not only production, but also scrap, accidents, machine utilization, and other key operating statistics, for its 82 factories worldwide. Executives knew exactly which factories were well-run, and in what ways, because they knew the specific targets and outcomes. More important was their ability to take action: Plant managers were moved from factory to factory in order to transfer best practices and operating acumen. Only by knowing exactly what was needed in each factory -- actionable information -- could the executives make a difference in performance.

As part of the investigation of causes of variance, an organization should also examine the processes by which it executes. Process performance optimization, the linking of business process events to key performance metrics, enables a business to clarify the relationship between the things managers control and the results they want. Every organization needs clarity into which steps in its processes are really providing value. Which step in claims processing is most closely associated with productivity? Which with customer satisfaction? The real value in improving the performance of a process comes not from improving the process itself but from its impact on the company's KPIs. Time to market isn't important in and of itself; market share, revenue, and profitability are the real metrics. Localized BPM can't tell you whether your process is really making a difference or just going a little faster. But combining this sort of data with financial metrics companywide can give you insight into its value to the organization.