Tracking Performance

Performance is something all organizations strive for, but many find difficult to quantify.

“A lot of organizations don’t necessarily know what their performance is today, so it is kind of hard to improve on something if you don’t know where you are to begin with,” says Christina McKeon, director of product marketing for Alpharetta, Ga.-based Infor Global Solutions, a provider of performance management solutions.

All organizations have corporate plans that target improved business goals, budgeting, forecasting and financial considerations, she says, but successfully aligning those plans means monitoring, measuring and managing performance.

Advantage Sales and Marketing, an Irvine, Calif.-based outsource servicer of retail trade channels for the grocery, mass merchandise, specialty, convenience, drug, hardware and home center segments, realized relatively robust 8 percent growth last year. Chris Cernosek, the company’s senior database administrator, is responsible for ensuring that Advantage executives have access to timely performance data to support business decisions.

The company chose to implement the Infor enterprise-level performance management solution, designed to provide business-specific functionality that optimizes business processes across the organization. Infor applications can be deployed individually or in a suite configuration on a single platform.

Advantage relies on its reach, knowledge and broad services as a food broker to help grow client businesses. While it had been using a performance management solution for about a decade, it required increased visibility to react to changes or trends that may affect the business – what Cernosek calls the difference between relying on “clean data” rather than “dirty data.”

The integrity of the data “was always at risk,” he says. “It was always on the top of your mind whether the data was close to being right because it was in so many different people’s hands that you never know what you are going to look at. Now, we can update our data in almost real time.”

Create a link
Retail organizations are concerned with tracking the efficiency of operations as a benchmark, but use of performance management solutions brings financial performance into the equation, McKeon says. “Companies don’t necessarily link financial performance to operational performance [which] gives somewhat of a limited picture of what is actually going on,” she says. “What we encourage companies to do is to link the two.”

If a retailer wants to implement discounts to get more customers in the door and increase revenue in a challenging economic environment, a modeling component can present “what if” planning scenarios to determine the most appropriate discount points.

“They can determine before they actually put that program in place how it is going to impact revenue and how it is going to impact profitability,” McKeon says.

Performance management in merchandising, she says, puts organizations in the mode of targeting the longer term rather than “constantly scrambling where you are throwing different offers out there to see if any of them will fit.”

Cernosek says tracking performance during the economic downturn gave the company the ability to spot a key trend: As the economy shrank, consumers began eating out less at restaurants and began to embrace grocery shopping – and home meal preparation — with more vigor. “We could see these trends coming in the economy and how they would affect our manufacturers,” he says.