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The new New Economy Analyst
Report – June 08, 2002
Juergen Daum’s new New
Economy Best Practice service
©2002-2005 Juergen Daum. All rights reserved.
Performance Management Beyond
Budgeting: Why you
should consider it, How it
works, and Who should contribute to make it
happen.
News categories: Enterprise and business strategy, Finance and accounting, Performance management and controlling, Information Technology
by
Juergen
H. Daum
Table of content:
Intro
Why should a company consider to move
Beyond Budgeting ?
How does the Beyond Budgeting model
work ?
Who should contribute to make it happen
?
The Transition Route – Major
success factors
Additional resources (updated Jan 2005)
“Fixed
budgets don’t work today. A
budget is a too static
instrument and locks managers
into the past - into something
they thought last year that it
was right. To be effective in
a global economy with rapidly
shifting market conditions and
quick and nimble competitors,
organization have to be able
to adapt constantly their
priorities and have to put
their resources where they can
create most value for
customers and shareholders. In
order to do that, they need
the right concepts, management
processes and tools –
concepts such as the Beyond
Budgeting Management Model. The
introduction of new management
instruments such as the
Balanced Scorecard, which help
to better align the entire
organization with corporate
strategic objectives and to
focus it on the essentials,
has created the right
foundation. Because if
corporate strategy and the
objectives are clear for all
people in an organization, one
can principally react faster
to changing market conditions.
But then the fixed
budget comes into their way
and prevents them from really
doing the right things. Though
what is often missing is a
more flexible operational
planning and control model.
The Beyond Budgeting model
wants to fill exactly this gap.”
Juergen
H. Daum
New!
-
visit J.H.D.'s
Beyond Budgeting Info Center
-
including latest BB insight
materials, interviews with BB
pioneers etc. - here an
extract:
| J.D.'s
insight article "Beyond
Budgeting" | Interview
with Lennart Francke, CFO of
Svenska Handelsbanken
| Panel
Discussion with Borealis,
Nestlé, and Unilever
| Interview
with Jeremy Hope –
co-founder of the Beyond
Budgeting Round Table
|
Interview with J.D. on
finance and IT
|
Three
years ago I presented to a group of senior executives at the headquarters of a
large U.S. based consumer products company with global operations the concept
of “Strategic Enterprise Management” (SEM) – a concept that ties enterprise
management closer to strategy and establishes management processes that make it
easier to manage trade offs in the business system and to adapt strategy,
operative activities, and resource utilization plans faster to changes in a
company’s environment. At the same time SEM was also an emerging new software
product to support these management processes (and I was the product manager at
SAP for it). When I started to talk about the limitations of the traditional
budget based management system, I received strong agreement from these
executives: yes, the budget ties managers to the past, it does not provide them
with incentives to look for new growth opportunities, and it makes the
organization as a whole very inflexible. When I was talking about that “every
manager is sitting on his budget after it is released – no possibility to adapt
priorities, when the world is changing” – I saw just nodding heads. The most
exciting thing of the SEM concept for them was, that it enables their
organization to become more flexible and to react to change faster. They told
me that this represent their most important objective with respect to their
intentions to improve the management system of the company. And after we
finished in the afternoon with the workshop on the planning processes, which
was mainly targeted at the responsible person for budgeting and planning, the
corporate controller stood up and asked the budgeting manager to come back
until the following week with a plan for implementing the SEM concept and to
define the requirements for the information systems to support it.
Meanwhile many other companies I worked with followed the same route and
wanted to move beyond their traditional budgeting based management system. The
reason is, that fixed budgets don’t
work today. How can they? How can a static instrument that locks you
into something you thought about last year be effective in a global economy
with rapidly shifting market conditions and quick and nimble competitors?
Comparing the “annual budget”, which is in essence last year’s reality, with
actual revenues and expenditures on a monthly basis does not provide companies
with useful information to manage their business. It merely locks them and their managers into the past. Rolling,
perhaps monthly, forecasts and budgets focuses them on current and future
realities. Through monthly or even event based forecasting, managers in an
organization are forced to think ahead. For the company as a whole, it provides
the possibility to offer realistic expectations for revenues and costs, and
allows senior management to react before financial figures turn into the
red. Budgets and forecasts are tools
for resource allocation. Resource
allocation needs to be consistent with strategy and prevailing business
conditions. Companies have to manage strategy as a continuous process, so that
strategy can be adaptive to changing business conditions, and resource
allocation can follow suit. In this regard, they should approach strategy just
as they do day-to-day operations. As they execute strategy-setting tasks again
and again on a monthly or even weekly basis, they need an appropriate strategy
and corporate performance management system that allows them to do that very
efficiently.
While regular, ideally event driven forecasting
(events that threaten to reach defined objectives and targets) represent the
core building block of any performance management system “beyond budgeting”, it
is not enough. Also the behaviour and the entire management culture has to
change.
Around the same time, begin of 1998, when I started
with research for our SEM project at SAP, working with some innovative
customers and with some of the leading experts and consultants in the US and
Europe, the CAM-I Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT) was founded in the UK.
Their mission was to identify companies that abandoned budgeting, analyse what
they did instead in steering the organization and to try to identify the
principles of a new management model that will enable companies to introduce
more effective management processes and steering mechanisms. In fall 2000 we
met and reconciled our findings and concepts. Interestingly, there was a large
overlap (if not a total match) concerning the concepts for SEM management
processes and BBRT management processes. But the real differentiator was the
fact, that the BBRT concept tries to deal also with the soft facts of the new
management system. The biggest contribution from the BBRT and Beyond Budgeting
concept and what makes it really unique is that they found that today’s
companies need – beside more effective and flexible management processes
“beyond budgeting”, which usually are focused on the “hard facts”, that is on
numbers – a management culture that enables managers to really perform and to
develop their and their people’s capabilities. That is the reason why the
Beyond Budgeting concept is consisting of two elements: a framework of 6 rules
that focus on a management culture that allows frontline managers to really
perform, and of 6 rules that focus on adaptive management processes that
support such a management culture (see my first report about the BBRT concept
from May 22, 2001).
Why should a company consider to move Beyond Budgeting
?
The management system’s task is to institutionalize decisions
through management processes on strategy adjustments, but also on adjustments
of operational enterprise activities and resource utilization plans. This
should enable the enterprise to continually control and optimize its short and
long-term success in a dynamically changing enterprise environment.
Every enterprise today is challenged by the fast
change of market conditions, technologies, or customer behavior. Peter Drucker
writes: “One cannot manage change, one can only can be ahead of it” (Peter
Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, New York, 1999).
Companies and organizations of all kind have to become change leaders if they
want to survive in today’s market environment. One specific characteristic of a
change leader is, to perceive change as an opportunity. A change-leader
organization is searching always for changes in its environment and disposes of
the necessary “Organizational Intelligence” that allows it to identify quickly
what changes are required internally and in their business model/system in
order to respond. In addition, change leaders are also able to effectively
translate the required change into action effectively with the objective to not
only maintain their actual market position but to extend it by leveraging the
changes happening in their markets.
And this is especially true for companies that are
based on intangible assets. They are subject to a higher risk exposure,
especially to the risk of changing markets. Knowledge-based assets are also
often characterized by "spill over effects" where competitors detract
from the use of an innovation that its investors have, by copying it. This can
be partially restricted by means of patents or protection of proprietary
rights, but usually not completely. This is because knowledge based assets and
related products can be copied much more easily than physical assets based
value creation systems, which require considerable capital investments, which
not every start up is able to fund. The problem can often only be solved by use
of "time-to-market", where the investors are on the market with the
product faster than the competition, and where the investors rapidly increase
their own market share. This requires a close link between markets and internal
development activities on the one side, and with commercialization activities
on the other, with the capability for fast adaptation in the case of changing
markets as the key success factor.
But this rule not only applies today to knowledge and
R&D intensive companies like in the pharmaceutical and high tech
industries. As more and more companies, also in traditional industries, rely on
intangible assets, the phenomenon becomes a more common one. Enterprise
management systems therefore have to be designed in a way, that they do not
only support companies and their managers to monitor and optimize their
performance in the area of costs and revenues, but also to enable them to
recognize immediately limits to growth in their value creation system and to
eliminate them, as well as to control and manage output, that is the
commercialization process. What is required are management systems, which
enable dynamic action and reaction and fast, nearly continuous adaptation of
the business system and of business activities to market and technology
changes. The budget, the budgeting based traditional management systems
represents a hurdle for an enterprise’s success rather than a supporting tool.
Traditionally, the corner stone of the management
system of a company is the budget. Budgeting is the central instrument of
traditional management systems. All management processes and methods are based
on and aligned with it: from strategy planning through resource allocation and
cost management to monthly performance measurement and rewards. The budget
determines how managers behave and on what activities and objectives they
focus. And the main problem today is the inflexibility of the budget based
management system. These annual budgets, which are absorbing considerable
management time and other resources in creating them, are fixed over the
following fiscal year as soon as they are released. Through monthly
actual/budget comparisons companies check, how good manages are in meeting
their budgets. The main target of these managers therefore is, to not exceed
their budget, because their bonus is dependent on meeting the budget.
But a strategic instrument that locks managers into
something they thought and found right at the end of the previous fiscal year,
can not be effective in a global knowledge economy with rapidly shifting market
conditions and quick and nimble competitors. The monthly actual/budget
comparison, which compares financial actuals, that is actual revenues and
expenditures, with a budget that is typically already overtaken by reality only
after a few weeks of the new fiscal year have passed, locks these managers in
the past and in the fictive world of the budget.
Companies are therefore trying to get rid of their inflexible budgets. They are moving instead to continuous rolling forecasting as part of their management processes, which enable for fast and coordinated adaptation to anticipated changes in their business environment and which also allow to balance the initiated change-management activities with continuity and short term performance.
The key for it is an integrated strategy and corporate
performance management process, of which the core and central process is not
any more a fixed budget but a dynamic forecasting process (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Integrated strategy and corporate performance management processes
(source: Juergen Daum,
Intangible Assets and Value Creation, 2002)
In contrast to the monthly actual/budget comparison,
rolling monthly forecasts of financial performance and for other non-financial
value drivers, which are related to the different value creation processes of a
company, focus managers on current and future opportunities and risks and not
on the past. The forecasting process forces them to look ahead and to achieve
market objectives under changing conditions, instead of focusing their
attention on how they can better meet the budget.
In addition, budgeting is an expensive activity: the
average company invests more than 25000 person days per billion dollars of
revenue in the planning and performance measurement processes; a KPMG study
showed that inefficient budgeting is eating up 20 to 30 percent of senior
executives’ and financial manager’s time. But the strategic costs, the
opportunity costs for companies not being able to thrive in the new knowledge
and intangible based economy will probably be much larger.
The CAM-I BBRT names six external factors affecting
every company today and that are driving the case for change to abandon
traditional budgeting and to move to the Beyond Budgeting model:
-
Shareholders are more
demanding and are only loyal to those
organizations that are consistently at (or near) the top in their industry. But
investors measure relative performance of companies (relative to their industry
peers), rather than absolute performance. An important fact that needs to be
considered when designing the Beyond Budgeting model.
-
Talented people are increasingly
scarce. They want freedom,
challenge and responsibility. And they care about values and the environment.
-
The pace of innovation is
increasing and product and strategy
life cycles are shrinking. To compete, firms must produce a constant stream of
new solutions and strategies
-
Prices are falling and
quality is rising. Firms
must be operationally excellent to compete
-
Customers are in charge and will switch loyalties if not totally satisfied.
Firms must keep close to customers and respond rapidly to their changing needs.
-
Demands for higher standards
of ethical and social responsibility. Investors and regulators are demanding more open and honest
performance reporting.
How does the Beyond Budgeting model work ?
The response of companies should be – according to the
CAM-I BBRT – to develop a new leadership vision and governance model in order
to establish a new performance management climate that allows an organization
to react to these external factors and changes and to move to a networked type
of organization, where decision power is devolved to those, who know the
business the best: to frontline managers (see figure 2). The BBRT calls this a devolutionary framework:
1.
Create a performance climate
based on competitive success – rather
than on internal politics and on the principle that managers have to meet pure internal performance commitments
2.
Motivate people by offering
them challenge, responsibility, clear values as guidelines (instead of clear orders) and shared rewards
3.
Devolve
performance responsibility to operating managers; give them the freedom to
decide
4.
Empower operational managers
by giving them the capability to act, by removing resource constraints (but agree on certain limiting
parameters such as for example “cost-income-ratio” in bank)
5.
Organize around customer
oriented teams that are accountable for profitable customer outcomes – not around functions and departments that are
accountable for meeting just the budget
6.
Support
transparent and open information systems that provide “one truth” throughout
the organization
Figure 2: The new environment is driving the case for
change of a company’s governance model
To make that really happen, the company needs a new
way, how it manages performance, that is finance and the CFO have to come up
with a new type of performance processes:
1.
The goal setting process: It should be based on agreeing external benchmark
based targets, not on negotiating fixed targets. This is focusing mangers on
beating the competition and not on meeting the budget. If the market goes up, a
manager is still challenged to do better than competitors.
2.
The motivation and rewards
process: It should be based on
recognizing and rewarding team-based success. Today, no single person can act
alone in achieving specific targets for an organization. To reward people
individually for reaching specific targets will create tension and mistrust in
the organization, which is a recipe for bad performance.
3.
The strategy and action
planning process: It should be devolved to
operating mangers and made continuous. It should not be managed centrally as an annual event. Only this way
a company is able to use the know how from the people at the customer front to
adapt fast and constantly to changing market needs.
4.
The resource utilization process:
It should be based on local access to resources (within agreed parameters), not
on the basis on allocating them through annual
budgets. Only this way frontline managers are able to act fast in front
of threats and to realize sudden opportunities.
5.
The coordination process: It
should be based on making cross-company interactions through “market-like”
forces, not through predetermined
detailed actions set down in central plans. Frontline, operative units negotiate
resource and service requirements with service units and agree on certain
ranges for required services (service level agreements).
6.
The measurement and control
process: It should provide fast, open, and distributed information for
multilevel control. Information should be available to everyone, so that
operational managers are able to compare their performance with the one of
their colleagues and that senior managers can see what is going on and can
monitor and challenge their subordinates (instead of controlling them).
Information systems are playing a crucial role in
making the new concept happen. This are requirements for information systems to
support the Beyond Budgeting concept as I have presented it to the BBRT (see
figure 3):
-
Flexible KPI based
measurement systems that provide operational managers with timely and relevant
information and decision support (Data Warehouses and OLAP data marts,
Analytics, Fast Close / Business Activity Monitoring)
-
Flexible resource planning,
forecasting and monitoring processes require an information system that spans
the organization (a planning system and forecasting system decoupled from
operational systems and optimised for cross functional planning, but that can
integrate data from all sources – e.g.
based on a data warehouse system)
-
Flexible IT infrastructure
that is able to easily integrate various systems, provide flexibility to change
processes, enables user centric access and services without lousing the
necessary integration (an open and flexible IS infrastructure for accounting, analytics,
management process support and user interaction)
Figure 3: Management Information Delivery Architecture
(source: Juergen Daum, Intangible Assets
and Value Creation, 2002)
Analytical applications that supports managers and
business analysts in performance management and in communication processes
around performance management provide the tools and information they need to
act under the Beyond Budgeting principles. This has to include also a framework
for enterprise wide planning and forecasting as well as support for processes
such as activity based management (see figure 4).
Figure 4: Information Systems optimised for analytics
and decision support
Who should contribute to make it happen ?
Beside the business managers, two other corporate
functions contribute significantly to the success of companies in the
intangibles based new economy: the one of the chief financial officer (CFO) and
the one of the chief information officer (CIO). CFOs are the guardians of a
company’s financial resource and are, as the economic conscience of the
company, responsible for the economic transparency and for the “Business
Intelligence” of the enterprise, that is for the design and usefulness of its
management system. CIO’s are the masters of one of the most important basis
resources of intangibles based businesses: of the infrastructure for
information collection, information storage, and information distribution. The
CFO needs the help of the CIO, who has to provide the new information
technologies and infrastructure for the new management system. The CIO needs
the support of the CFO in order to be able to focus his resources and the
expertise of his team on those projects that are most relevant to the economic
success of the company.
But not only the “hard facts” are a decisive factors
for companies today. As the BBRT pointed out, also the soft factors, the
performance management culture of a company is crucial. People related success
factors might be ultimately the most important drivers of a company’s
performance. HR experts and people experienced with organizational change
projects should therefore be part of the project team.
And the guardian of the hard facts, the CFO, might
change his role as well in the transformation process. The core competency of a
CFO in the future, in order to create maximum value for his company, will be to
understand and monitor the economics of the value creation system of his
company. This also has to include the ability to translate - together with his
management team colleagues - this understanding into a concept for an
appropriate management and reporting system, and to provide related services to
management and investors, rather than to manage basic accounting processes and
the treasury function of the company. So the traditional role of a CFO will be
transformed from the role of a “chief cash manager and chief accountant” to the
one of an agile and active Chief Value Officer (CVO), who always keeps an eye
on the effectiveness of the value creation system of the company, on the
efficiency of its business processes, and on its unrealized value creation
potential and he is constantly pressing for its realization. The CFO will be
transformed from an administrator of administrative processes to a real
business partner for his management colleagues, who directly contributes to the
success of the company by ensuring the necessary management transparency.
Companies might start to establish business intelligence competence centres, of which the task is, to provide support for managers in understanding new business problems that require in-depth economic knowledge. This will include the collection, editing, and preparation of relevant unstructured internal and external business information that will be supplied to business managers and for example investors through the above-described web based self-services. In addition, the center will provide other services such as management consulting, training in business issues and economics (for example also in form of online webcasts), M&A services, investor relation services etc.. The staff of the centre might come from different functions: from HR, finance, strategic planning, from the operational business … (see figure 5).
Figure 5: The corporate Business Intelligence
Competence Centre (source: Juergen Daum, Intangible Assets
and Value Creation, 2002)
The Transition Route – Major success factors
The move to a performance management model “beyond
budgeting” is not an easy task. It requires an active commitment of the
executive level. To get their buy in, is therefore the most important step in
making it happen. A possible action plan for implementing a new performance
management system beyond budgeting may therefore look like this one:
-
Identify the problem areas
with the current performance management system (e.g. through a structured
survey) and actively sell the case for change and a vision for a new system to
senior management
-
Look for quick wins (by
providing e.g. fast actuals, by improving access to information, by moving to
continuous forecasting, by introducing new KPI’s …) – start small, be fast
- Set up a cross-functional, interdisciplinary team to steer and manage the implementation project – the team can serve later as the core group of the new Business Intelligence Competence Center
Traditionally, the corner stone of the management
system of a company is the budget. The budget determines how managers behave and
on what activities and objectives they focus. These annual budgets, which are
absorbing considerable management time and other resources in creating them,
are fixed over the following fiscal year as soon as they are released. Through
monthly actual/budget comparisons companies check, how good manages are in
meeting their budgets. The main target of these managers therefore is, to not
exceed their budget, because their bonus is dependent on meeting the budget.
In today’s business environment, which forces
companies to constantly change and adapt to changing customer demands and
markets, the budget is not the right tool anymore to manage a company and its
performance. It locks managers into something they thought and found right at
the end of the previous fiscal year. It can not be effective in a global
knowledge economy with rapidly shifting market conditions and quick and nimble
competitors.
Companies are therefore looking today for performance
management concepts “Beyond Budgeting”. They are experimenting already with KPI
based reporting systems, rolling or event driven continuous forecasting etc..
But what is needed is a more comprehensive and systematic approach. A concept
which is gaining increasingly mind share worldwide and which intends to provide
just that, is the Beyond Budgeting concept of the CAM-I BBRT. It tries to
combine the hard fact side in form of new performance management processes
(typically the responsibility of finance) with the soft fact side of a new
performance management climate and a “devolutionary framework”, where the
people at the front, working with customers, get the freedom to decide and act
(typically the responsibility of the CEO and of HR).
To make it happen it requires the commitment of the
executive team, but the contribution of especially three corporate functions:
-
finance (hard facts)
-
IT (bringing the hard facts
to everyone)
-
HR (managing the change from
a people perspective)
Additional
resources
(updated Jan. 2005):
Juergen Daum’s Beyond Budgeting
Information Center New!
Website of the Beyond
Budgeting Round Table (BBRT)
Interview with Jeremy Hope
(co-founder of the BBRT):
The Origins of Beyond Budgeting and of the
Beyond Budgeting
Round Table (BBRT)
Enterprise
Management, Leadership and
Business Control for Value Creation
- presentation from
Juergen H. Daum, held at the
Executive Briefing on
Performance Measurement of
the Centre for
Business
Performance, Cranfield
School of Management, 27
January 2004 in London, UK
program
of the briefing
Beyond
Budgeting on the move:
report from the First Annual
Beyond Budgeting Summit in London,
1-2 July 2003
Enterprise
Management in the 21st
Century - A Blueprint for a
New Approachand the role
of Information Systems
Presentation
held by Juergen Daum at the BBRT
member's meeting,
26 June 2003in
Walldorf/Germany, and held as
well at the First Annual
Beyond Budgeting Summit, 2nd July 2003
in London/UK program
of the summit
Interview
with Lennart Francke, CFO,
Svenska Handelsbanken,
Stockholm:
Managing without budgets at
Svenska Handelsbanken
Presentations
held by Juergen H. Daum at the Beyond Budgeting Round
Table member's meetings:
-
Dec 07,
2000,
London/UK: Strategic
Enterprise Management
- May
16, 2002,
London/UK:
Information
System Requirements for
Performance Management Beyond
Budgeting
SAP’s White Paper “Beyond
Budgeting”, which was co-authored by colleagues at SAP AG,
Juergen Daum, and the Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing International (CAM-I) Beyond
Budgeting Round Table
Beyond
Budgeting – article from Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser (the initiators and
researchers behind the CAM-I BBRT concept), published in the U.S. Magazine
“Strategic Finance”, issue October 2000
Panel
discussion at the eCFO conference 2001
of the CFO Europe Magazine, Oktober 18-19, 2001 in Brussels, Belgium: "The
Beyond Budgeting Management Model". Participants: Janet Kersnar,
Editor-in-Chief CFO Europe Magazine; Guiseppe Biamino, manager Budgeting &
Controlling at SNAM Rete Gas in Italy; Robin Fraser, Program Director CAM-I
BBRT; Peter Herold, Senior Manager Deloitte Consulting UK; Juergen Daum,
SAP AG. Can a company really implement the Beyond Budgeting model? This
question was discussed by the participants on the panel: »video
(Real Player) »video
(Media Player)
Intangible Assets and Value
Creation – a book from Juergen Daum, focusing on a new enterprise model and
on the new management system “beyond budgeting” for the new knowledge and
intangible assets based economy of today, comprising many examples and case
studies. It describes the new environment and its consequences for businesses,
the rules that can be extracted from this understanding for the design of a new
management system, and it develops a framework for a new management system and
describes its elements, as well as how a company can set it up and bring it to
live.
Why
today's accounting, controlling and management systems fail - in an
interview with sapinfo.net, Jürgen H. Daum explains the limitations of our
traditional management tools in our economies of today and why an overhaul is
necessary
Value Drivers
Intangible Assets – Do we need a new approach to accounting, controlling and
management systems ? – article by Juergen Daum
Performance
Management and Business Controlling in the 21st Century (Presentation
held by Juergen Daum at SAP's
European mySAP Financials Conference, June 2002, Strassbourg / France) deutsche
Version
Previous new New
Economy Analyst reports related to the topic of the new performance management
system (updated Jan. 2005):