OREANDA-NEWS. July 06, 2009. PricewaterhouseCoopers has presented the results of its “Performance Management. How do you manage your business?” survey. The purpose of the survey was to explore existing performance management concepts, as well as approaches and tools used to manage corporate performance. The results of the survey make it possible to assess the development of corporate performance management approaches and the implementation of relevant IT solutions to support the process, reported the press-centre of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The survey was conducted between September 2008 and January 2009 and involved professionals from nearly 400 companies in 22 countries across Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS. 8% of respondents were from Russia. 69% of Russian respondents and 64% of other survey participants were senior executives, with 41% representing the financial industry and 21% the energy sector.

Anastasia Osipova, Partner, Performance Improvement, PricewaterhouseCoopers:
“Performance management is a model that aligns the company's strategy with its operations. In other words, it is about how strategic goals are translated into operational objectives, how planning and budgeting are effected and how this tallies with the motivation of individual employees.”

86% of Russian respondents believe it is important or very important to manage a business using a system of KPIs derived from strategy and 61% already use such a system.

Even though the majority understand the value of a strategy-derived Corporate Performance Management (CPM) framework, and a high proportion of those have already deployed such a system, 45% of Russian respondents say they are unsatisfied or very unsatisfied with planning and forecasting in their organisation.

The main areas of concern are the timeliness of information, the level of automation and the user-friendliness of IT tools.

Respondents indicated a significant gap between where they are today and where they think their organisation should be with respect to management information capabilities. At between 57% and 59%, the level of satisfaction among Russian respondents with the timeliness and accuracy of management data shows that there is still much room for improvement.

The majority of companies said that they have a heavy focus on data gathering, calculation and reconciliation (Russia 68%, the rest 59%). This contrasts sharply with the desire to rebalance reporting processes in favour of value adding activities such as data analysis and interpretation (Russia 59%, the rest 61%). To achieve this new balance, companies may need to substantially upgrade and automate their reporting processes.

Just 4% of Russian and 9% of non-Russian respondents are very satisfied with their IT technologies. 35% of non-Russian companies use ERP technologies to meet some of their performance management needs, compared with a figure of only 13% for Russian companies. 12% of Russian and non-Russian respondents said their companies use business intelligence technologies (BI technologies), which is low considering how long these technologies have been around and also considering that the cost of deploying them has fallen sharply.

Anastasia Osipova says:
“Many issues still surround the implementation of CPM solutions: satisfaction levels are low considering the value of such solutions, particularly for IT technologies. The focus as before remains on absolute KPIs such as total revenue or profit, though the survival and prosperity of companies during an economic crisis heavily depends on how flexible and efficient the CPM model is in terms of adjusting to the changing economic environment.”