According to Hackett's chief research officer, Richard T. Roth, "Companies with world-class BPM performance make better decisions, identify opportunities more quickly, respond faster to changes in their market, and keep their eye focused on the critical issues of building shareholder value." Although there is no secret formula for delivering superior returns in every company, our research points to several key BPM capabilities that enable the right information to reach the right people at the right time:

Hiring the brightest and best finance talent. This is clearly a good place to start. The businesses with world-class BPM in the Hackett study reported a 16 percent higher fully-loaded labor rate than their peer group (the companies in the bottom three quartiles). But this does not tell the full story. Although their employees are more expensive on a per-person basis, we found that world-class companies spend just 0.13 percent of corporate revenue on staff dedicated to BPM, compared with 0.25 percent for the peer group. This lower overall cost is achievable because the world-class group requires 57 percent less staff than the companies in the lower quartiles.

How is this possible? One reason is that the higher-paid employees in top-quartile companies are able to produce an ad hoc report almost a full business day quicker than their peers in less-efficient companies. The benefits of being able to fulfill this requirement a day faster should not be underestimated, given the potential competitive advantage that can be secured through rapid-fire situational analysis and report preparation in today's economy. Roth says, "The simple truth is that top companies operate with a smaller cadre of high-performing planning and performance management staff. World-class BPM companies recognize that high-caliber, well-trained staff are much more likely to provide the analytics, plans, and data that enable business-unit leaders to maintain a competitive advantage."

Focusing on report quality, not quantity. Interestingly, our research found that the world-class and peer groups generate about the same number of business performance reports per employee. Given that the world-class companies have far fewer staff, this means they are producing substantially fewer reports. If the number of reports generated were an accurate measure of BPM effectiveness, the top performers might be seen as markedly less productive than their peers. Yet when it comes to enabling better decision support, productivity is not always a useful gauge of performance. Another interesting result, which supports this conclusion, is that the internal customers of world-class companies report higher levels of satisfaction with the output of their BPM staff than do their counterparts in non-world-class organizations. The information that is generated and distributed to managers in top businesses is far more relevant for decision-making purposes.

Organizational leaders these days have more data to draw on than ever before. Despite this, many leadership teams fail to make strategic or operational decisions that are markedly better, or dispatched with any more confidence, than they historically did. Most organizations are stymied in their decision-making activities -- not despite, but because of, the floods of data that come their way. Although mining for golden nuggets of information buried within the deluge can be nearly impossible, it is proving much less of a challenge within world-class BPM organizations. For example, internal data customers within top-quartile companies are significantly more likely to describe cost analysis as "on target" than those in the typical company. And management at world-class organizations is 37 percent more likely to think forecasting and reporting outputs have a high degree of reliability.

Using technology to its fullest potential. That world-class companies spend more on each individual they employ, yet less overall on their labor force, is mirrored when we profile these organizations' use of technology. Those in the top quartile for BPM efficiency and effectiveness have a higher technology-to-cost ratio than their peer group -- in other words, the percentage of their spending on budgeting, planning, reporting, and the like, that is consumed by technology is high. Yet the world-class companies report a substantially lower technology cost as a percentage of revenue.

These organizations recognize that when used judiciously, technology can be swapped for labor costs. The top performers require significantly fewer clerical employees, as a percentage of total staff focused on performance management activities, than the rest of the organizations Hackett studied. By the same token, the proportion of professionals to total staff is elevated within the best-performing BPM functions.

Technology is, inarguably, the greatest enabler of BPM efficiency and effectiveness. The challenge for all organizations is to harness the power of technology so that it supports the decision-making process through better data access, improved analytics capabilities, and report generation and distribution. But for many companies, harnessing the power afforded by the past decade's significant advances in BPM-related technology is an onerous task. For the least effective IT departments, the result has been the spawning of myriad disparate and fragmented systems. These have supported, or created, fractured decision-support processes. Conversely, companies that have successfully absorbed IT innovations have reaped rich rewards through the creation of superior planning, reporting, and business intelligence capabilities.

Hackett research consistently finds that world-class companies excel in deploying technological solutions without attendant increases in complexity. They are relentless in their efforts to reduce complexity in both IT systems and processes. For instance, 62 percent of world-class companies' business performance reports are generated from a single database, 29 percent more than the proportion of single-database reports within the other companies surveyed. This is significant because a single data repository reduces errors and allows managers to spend less time searching for data and more time analyzing it. Moreover, world-class companies have fewer secondary planning systems and are less dependent on spreadsheets as their primary or secondary planning tool. This substantially less complex technology environment contributes enormously to reducing the cost of performance management; in world-class organizations, BPM process costs are just 0.13 percent of revenue compared with 0.26 percent for the peer group. Fewer applications translate into lower user fees and license costs, along with fewer support personnel.

In top companies, online budgeting and reporting tools are used much more pervasively. Operating managers at world-class organizations are over three times more likely than those within other companies to enter budget data into an online budgeting tool. Not surprisingly, these managers find the budgeting process more convenient and easy than do similar managers in the peer companies. They also have much better online access to reports than do operations managers in the peer group. Business performance reports are a full 140 percent more likely to be available for viewing through Web applications within world-class companies than within other businesses.

Web-based report viewing leads to more real-time information exchange and may offer a marked competitive advantage in rapidly changing markets. These Web-enabled reporting tools provide executives with timely information -- in many cases they're updated hourly -- including order and revenue status, product margins, cash cycle, and profit and loss statements. Additionally, these same online reports allow production managers to monitor throughput in conjunction with order receipt and shipment. The outcomes of world-class reporting are more satisfied customers, more robust customer information, better production and cost management, and improved profitability.

The core goal of BPM is to enable better decision support. By making performance information available online, world-class companies are improving decisions throughout their ranks. Roth concludes, "The point of expending effort in reshaping processes and implementing technology as part of a BPM program is so that business managers can make strategic and operational choices quicker, and do so with increased confidence. By better enabling the decision-making process, it is little wonder that companies with world-class BPM performance achieve greater returns for shareholders."