Solution Need

In the face of an increasingly fast-paced business environment, many businesses struggle to anticipate, let alone meet, their stakeholders’ objectives. Misaligned strategies, outdated plans and unreliable forecasts inhibit success. Many businesses depend on performance measures that lack consistency and which fail to reflect the structural business drivers.

In response, business managers are being asked to assimilate vast amounts of information, adopt new management techniques (for example, Management By Objectives (MBO), Balanced Score Card, Economic Value Added (EVA), X Matrix, Six Sigma and Deming Prize).

The situation is further compounded by multiple, stand-alone systems, often distributed across the different regions of operation, that fail to present a unified picture of the business, support collaboration between management teams or drive the execution of frequently revised plans.

Against this backdrop, Corporate Performance Management delivers both timely management information and hosts the individual management processes in a single, interactive and collaborative work space that allows teams of managers, from the board room to individual departments and across the extended supply-chain, to collectively measure performance, anticipate results and drive profitability. 

The Ibhar Performance Management solution offers clear benefits to companies seeking to fully automate their Corporate Performance Management and Strategy Deployment processes. Ibhar Performance Management solution assists organizations to achieve their business plan or objectives. This essentially means providing organizations with the ability to

• Deploy organizational objectives

• Assign clear KPI’s

• Assign metrics to measure each KPI

• Assign accountability and responsibilities for each objective

• Ability to measure, monitor and manage each KPI

The Ibhar solution allows organizations to manage the entire strategy deployment, measurement and management process by empowering enterprises with the ability to operationalize the following key processes:

Deploy

Deploy the business plan or organizational objectives. These could be any framework, which may include popular management frameworks like Balanced Scorecard, Management By Objectives (MBO), Management For Objectives (MFO), X-Matrix etc. Objectives and KPI’s can be assigned and cascaded to all management levels and hierarchies.

Plan

“PLAN THE WORK and WORK THE PLAN”

Ibhar recommends Activity Based Management as a route to achieving Organizational Results. The logic being that only efforts can be managed and if managed well, the results are incidental. The Ibhar Performance Manager features functionalities to assist users plan efforts on each operational area or KPI that is assigned to them. The Ibhar solution is tightly integrated with Ms Outlook / Lotus Notes and hence all plan items are automatically displayed on the user diaries in Ms Outlook / Lotus Notes, thus reducing double entry and also promoting ease of use as most users are familiar with the Ms Outlook or Lotus Notes environment.

Act

The Ibhar Performance Manager provides an environment for users to organize their work and act on it. Also allows users with the ability to log all issues and communication that surrounds a KPI that they are supposed to work on. Ibhar provides this facility to users within the familiar MS Outlook or Lotus Notes environments thus reducing resistance to change and inducing ease of use.

Review

The Ibhar Performance Manager provides Managers with the ability to review performance, which means availability of relevant data, ability to analyze and take action via mails, writing online reviews or assigning tasks or specific activities to direct reports’. We believe this is a key functionality as this operationalizes the Performance ScoreCard. It is only when Managers can look at information and act on it and keep track of also actions on a KPI that it can bring about significant value to the enterprise. The focus in the solution has to not only present Performance Data but also provide a framework for users to effectively take action on it thereby ensuring performance.

Appraise

The Ibhar Performance Manager makes available all performance related information specific to each KPI available for appraisals. These include not only the quantifiable target related information but also issues, activities, mail tracks and review notes, thus ensuring an objective and transparent appraisal process.

To improve performance assessments, the Ibhar Performance solution tracks performance against projections and budgets and also provides insight into performance by providing other non-quantitative data like efforts, mail tracks, issues, review notes etc. All this can lead to an extremely transparent and objective appraisal process.

Meetings

Additionally Ibhar Performance Manager also operationalizes processes like meetings to enable online minuting of meetings, task assignments etc. This functionality automatically creates minutes of meetings and emails participants. More importantly, it creates tasks agreed on during the meetings into Outlook/Lotus calendars of users. These can then be linked to KPI and tracked using reminders and escalations. This mitigates the risk of operational performance related activities not getting done.

The core component of the Ibhar Performance Manager solution, consists of a Microsoft Visual Basic application that uses COM add-ins. These add-ins support the designing and scripting of Outlook templates through Microsoft Outlook 2000 folders. Semi-structured data, such as scheduling, and team-based information is stored in Microsoft Exchange folders. Structured analytical data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database.

All key information is consolidated from all users in the Microsoft SQL database—simplifying analysis and decision making. A Business Intelligence module incorporating Microsoft Office Web Components allows super users and managers to build OLAP cubes from current data that has been extracted from the SQL Server using the SQL Analysis Manager.

The Ibhar Performance Manager solution relies on a solid foundation of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SQL Server technologies. The solution uses a component-based architecture consisting of a Presentation Layer, a Business Layer, and a Data Layer.
 

PRESENTATION LAYER

The Presentation Layer consists of a combination of Microsoft and Ibhar desktop components that provide access to the system. These interfaces include:

• Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Office Web components

• Ibhar Performance Manager module

Because this solution uses existing Microsoft Outlook and Exchange conventions, the user Presentation Layer is immediately familiar and simple to master. The Outlook and Exchange combination keeps users updated with the latest application and screen enhancements automatically by means of Outlook Forms.

BUSINESS LAYER

The core of the system consists of the Ibhar Administration and Workflow engine. This central configuration and customization module controls all of the business rules favored by the organization.

This layer contains additional modules such as the Business Intelligence module. The Business Intelligence module is based on data warehousing and multidimensional data analysis techniques. Multidimensional cubes are built from the data warehouse and then made available through the Analysis Services component of SQL Server 2000.

Two-way exchange of data with other applications—a valuable factor in system integration can be accomplished using the Ibhar Data Repository and Data Integration engine. The engine exposes COM interfaces to update and retrieve data using a fully traversable object model.

DATA LAYER

The Data Layer constitutes the foundation of the system, consisting of a single data repository residing within a Microsoft SQL Server. The organization can fully utilize the full range of functions available through Microsoft SQL Server, including scalability, data replication, and fault-tolerance.

The preferred client and server environments includes the following components:

SERVERS

All servers are powered by Intel processor based systems running the following software:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2000

• Microsoft SQL Server 2000

• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services Component

CLIENTS

All client workstations are powered by Intel Pentium 4 processors running the following software:

• Microsoft Windows 98/2000/XP

• Microsoft Office 2000 or above

• Microsoft Office 2000—Office Web Components (OWC)

• Microsoft Outlook 2000 or above

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or above

PDA s 

• Microsoft Pocket PC 2002

 DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

• Microsoft Visual Basic

Customer 1

A large Sugar manufacturing organization with multiple manufacturing and operating locations, realising that they needed an automated approach towards business management in general and Performance Management in particular adopted the Ibhar Performance Management solution to:

• Help them deploy and cascade their strategy across the organization

• Conduct online and continuous Reviews

• Perform online reviews, which are objective and transparent.

The largest Auto Ancillaries manufacturer in India chose the Ibhar Performance Management Solution to spearhead changes in its strategies.

It helped them effectively deploy organizational goals and tie it in with various quality and other initiatives across the enterprise.