Business performance management, in simple terms, is the management of business performance by means of monitoring business processes and measuring their performance such that it can be compared to either control experiments, model situations or other companies' standardized performance results so that the business owners can take full advantage of ever business's potential to have maximum efficiency when it comes to turning a profit.

In a highly mechanized marketplace decision-making fuelled by complex measuring systems are capable of bringing companies wave after wave of revenue. Fast moving consumer goods, for example, are sprayed out across the consumer world at a pace which would be impossible were the companies producing and selling these goods not using salient information to both understand the needs and demands of their potential customers and, more importantly, to help find the best way to drive the intuitive response of an average person so that they automatically give preference to the brand you are pushing.

This aggressive and very conservative commercial approach is in some cases the single most vital force in making a company massive. A certain leading fizzy cola drink, for example, has built a solid global monoply based entirely on sending a never-ending stream of messages out to the world. It is highly likely that the messages are very very very much in tune with what the people out there want to hear. They could be selling earwax remover and still have the same brand power and market value simply by doing exactly what they do now but with a different product. That is the power of precise business performance management.

The obvious area which a business would choose to monitor its performance is the field of customers and sales. Even before any formal measuring system is implemented a business is likely to have adequate records to be able to accurately tally its customers and sales. A slightly more advanced setup will ensure that sales can be matched to customers (anyone with any level of CRM will obviously have such a setup).

As well as the measurement of sales and customers, the measurement of potential sales, market reach, potential market reach and the effectiveness of any campaigns to increase that market reach will all obviously be the next most important performance figures a business owner is going to want to see. Beyond that are all the various statistics showing the internal performance of the business - figures showing the cost of operating and the efficiency and effectiveness of each constituent resource.

Simply having these figures available is not enough. A rigorous approach to tabulating the data in the most informative ways, enabling measurements of risk to be calculated when deciding new or alternative directions for the business to pursue.

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