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Well-designed Business Intelligence (BI) applications can give everyone in your company the ability to gain insight into critical operations through enhanced reporting, dashboards, visualization and analytics. With USDM’s powerful BI solutions, you can significantly enhance the use of your existing applications, without rewriting them, to make the various information assets in your organization more timely, relevant and accurate to drive better decision making that impacts your bottom line.
Traditional business intelligence systems are delivered via host terminals or paper reports and often include the “insignificant many” performance indicators, key business metrics and multitude of other data which are collected and reported on a monthly basis giving you a “rear view mirror” look at where the business has been.
USDM’s BI solutions are deployed over the Web, via internet or intranet connections and focus on the “vital few”, integrating data from disparate sources into a single, coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by many different classes of users – from the corporate executive to the assembly line worker; from the lab scientist to the Quality Assurance auditor; from the financial analyst sitting at his desk to the sales representative who’s always on the road.

Performance Measurement

USDM has developed a framework for measuring the performance of various organizational practices to evaluate their effectiveness and demonstrate strategic business impact. Measurement provides you with the information necessary to make intelligent decisions about how to better run your business. For example, you might want to have greater visibility to understand the performance of your project management processes, your project management office, your training initiatives or your overall business strategies. USDM will work with you, in conjunction with our Business Intelligence practice, to develop a measurement program uniquely customized for your organization to accurately demonstrate performance results to key stakeholders.

Why Measure Performance?

• Identify areas for performance improvement
• Benchmark against industry/competitors
• Set targets
• Achieve organizational objectives
• Identify trends for forecasting and planning
• Evaluate the effectiveness of change initiatives
• Determine the impact of initiatives
• Justify investments

USDM begins by working with your current measurement team to clearly identify your objectives and goals. This includes a review of your organizational mission and strategies, organizational structure, key business processes, current measurement systems and relationship to rewards/recognition systems, data availability and stakeholder values.

Key Business Metrics (KBMs) and Management Dashboards

USDM works with your team to prioritize and select the critical few measures based on agreed-upon criteria that will form the basis of your management dashboard. These measures flow from, and are aligned with, your organizational goals and objectives and are developed collaboratively with the measurement team and stakeholders. We emphasize the “vital few” rather than the insignificant many and the real-time use of data and reports to make decisions on how to improve the day-to-day management of your business rather than the traditional “rear view mirror” monthly management review of historical data from last month’s performance.
We also work with your team to utilize information systems such as Business Objects and Cognos to integrate data measurement across business applications to arrive at more meaningful metrics. As an example, most Quality Management systems identify the number of deviations or non-conformances by functional department on a weekly or monthly basis. Through the use of our business intelligence tools and integration with your ERP or MES systems, we can integrate the data and report the number of deviations or non-conformances as a percentage of the number of batch records or production orders executed during the period and analyze this data against prior periods to determine if performance is improving, declining or stagnating – a true quality indicator of enterprise performance.

Program Implementation Planning

Implementation planning efforts define the framework around performance measurement processes and data collection that will be used to support ongoing measurement program implementation. We guide you through the identification of the data collection team, data sources, and data collection processes, including the use of information systems such as Business Objects and Cognos needed to support the integration of data across the enterprise to establish more meaningful metrics.
Program Implementation
Program implementation is an on-going effort to execute the measurement program as documented in the implementation plan. This begins with the preparation for the initial collection-analysis-reporting cycle and continues through execution and refinement.