Corporate Performance Management 

Strategic management ... Corporate governance ... Performance measurement ... Process drivers ... Problem identification ...Value creation ... Goal alignment. These high-level business needs are only a sampling of the terms and concepts wrapped into the concept of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and similar concepts like Business Performance Management (BPM), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Strategic Performance Manage-ment (SPM), etc.

What Is Corporate Performance Management (CPM)?
CPM is best understood in two parts: Operational CPM and Analytical CPM. Operational CPM addresses the business process needs of executives and financial managers. Analytical CPM addresses the reporting and analysis needs of executives, managers and staff through all levels of an organization, as well as vendors, suppliers and partners.

Where Will You Get CPM?
Some niche software vendors are bundling software for budgeting, planning and forecasting with a scorecard product, resulting in a non-integrated and usually expensive combination of two separate feature sets under the label of CPM, BPM, etc. Such an approach to CPM is unproven; a much more rational approach is to source your CPM needs from the more established technologies of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI).

For Operational CPM, ERP software is well suited to address planning, budgeting, forecasting, and other operational process needs. Operational requirements for CPM hinge on having financial and managerial process tools that work in concert with existing back-end and other front-end operational applications, all of which are generally provided by enterprise application vendors.

For Analytical CPM, your BI technology should deliver the complete set of analytic requirements. Analytic requirements for CPM include scorecarding and dashboarding, enterprise reporting, first-order analysis, advanced and predictive analysis, and alerting, all of which should be provided on a single enterprise-class BI platform. Enterprises looking to manage corporate performance comprehensively require best-in-class software for both the operational and analytical requirements of CPM.

Addressing Specific Business Needs With Analytical CPM
CPM is frequently associated with management methodologies, such as Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma, and Activity Based Management. Many enterprises embrace these methodologies or rely on internally developed methodologies. At the end of the day, there are five specific business needs common across all CPM methodologies. These business needs require core Analytical CPM capabilities, which are delivered through the five styles of Business Intelligence.