Management
Excellence
Continued
Strategy to Success: Achieving Management Excellence
Leveraging the capabilities of Oracle enterprise performance management, Oracle is pioneering a series of integrated management processes designed to help organizations achieve management excellence. As illustrated above, this framework has six core processes and is called “strategy to success.”
Gain to sustain is the management process for connecting corporate strategy with the interests of key stakeholders including employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, citizens, and investors.
Leading organizations improve this process to gain greater access to capital, have more-engaged employees, and build better relationships with their customers and suppliers by increasing the transparency of their business operations.
Investigate to invest is the management process for identifying, evaluating, and creating the most-attractive market opportunities for a company to invest in. This process involves combining external information such as market intelligence and competitive intelligence with internal analysis of the product or service portfolio performance as well as customer and geographic performance.
Leading enterprises benchmark their performance against key competitors, continuously monitor market alternatives, and are willing to invest in new markets or stop investing in existing markets if it benefits stakeholders.
Design to decide is the management process for designing the business infrastructure and partner network to deliver value to customers in the most profitable way. This process involves analysis to determine the company’s outsourcing strategy, business partners and channels, and acquisition and divestment strategy, as well as its financing strategy.
Leading companies are continuously looking for different ways to reach their goals, instead of sticking to a fixed plan. Through techniques such as scenario analysis and what-if modeling, they are able to see changes in the market before anyone else and have the strategic ability to continuously capitalize on these changes.
Plan to act is the management process for aligning the organization across departments as well as business functions to achieve its goals. This process involves aligning targets from strategic to operational levels, resolving gaps between financial plans and operational constraints, and continuously forecasting to keep the organization on track.
Leading companies integrate all business planning processes in order to assess the integrated impact of business decisions and to deliver predictable results. This provides companies with the agility to anticipate or even drive changes in the market.
Analyze to adjust is the management process for analyzing deviations from a company’s goals in order to take corrective actions. This process involves actions ranging from immediate tactical responses such as changing a customer’s credit status to adjusting the business plan or even re-evaluating the strategy, depending on the magnitude of the impact.
Leading companies have a multitude of analytics within every single business domain, and have established a single version of the truth in their data, metadata, and master data across these analytics. This allows them to create leading metrics and a chain of cause and effect throughout their complete business.
Record to report is the management process for providing strategic, financial, and operational feedback to understand how a business is performing. This process involves collecting, transforming, and delivering relevant, timely, and accurate information to all stakeholders inside and outside the organization, in order to provide insight into how their expectations have been met.
Leading companies accelerate their financial close process to report their results to regulators and investors as fast as possible. In addition they ensure the accurate and reliable reporting of information to prevent financial restatements that could cause severe financial consequences. An emerging best practice is to provide maximum transparency to stakeholders not only from a financial perspective, but including the impact on economic, environmental, and social factors.
This article is based on the contributions of Ivo Bauermann, Frank Buytendijk, Rich Clayton, and Thomas Oestreich.
For More Information
Oracle Enterprise Performance Management
Striking Out for Global Reach
Sustained Excellence
Oracle CIO Summit
Oracle’s Agile PLM Applications
Anne Ozzimo is senior director of applications product marketing at Oracle.
