Business Objects SA will announce Wednesday a new product called Performance Manager, enhancing its offerings in the business performance management space.
Performance Manager includes goal management, scorecards, and strategy maps, allowing customers to align goals and performance with enterprise strategy, Business Objects officials in San Jose, Calif. said.
In January, Business Objects released the first product in its Enterprise Performance Management family, BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager for deploying dashboards and alerts. Performance Manager is designed to “close the loop” between corporate strategy and daily tactical performance, according to Business Objects officials.
Performance Manager provides a wizard driven workflow for defining, modifying and distributing goals based on employees roles. Users can set an accepted margin on the desired target and assign ownership to individuals or groups in any department or function.
Scorecarding is also role-based and includes trend and stoplight indicators, giving users updates on metrics and performance relative to goals. Users can sort goals by relevance, status or strategy and drill down into additional details on the scorecard.
Performance Manager also includes strategy maps that show the relationships and dependencies between objectives as they relate to corporate initiatives and guided analysis and collaboration threads to support group decision making, officials said.
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DataLan Corp., a White Plains, N.Y.-based system integrator and Business Objects partner, is using Performance Manager internally to manage goals across its sales and marketing efforts, according to company president John Arnold.
It tracks employees sales performances by role and allows employees to track the reaching of sales milestones, Arnold said.
“We can define strategy and goals that ultimately map to our corporate strategy,” said Arnold. Arnold said he likes that goals can be mapped to particular employees roles.
“We can establish goals over a period of time, establish thresholds to be met, then define additional action to take once theyre met,” said Arnold.
Arnold said he also likes how the software supports team collaboration to solve a particular problem.
“Were starting to see that its giving people a way to manage themselves, by measuring themselves against their goals,” he said. Employees can in this way spot trends without having to wait for a batch-processed report to come out, Arnold noted.
Performance Manager will be available in July. It requires Dashboard Manager and the Business Objects Application Foundation. Pricing has not been finalized.