Pilot Software Drives New Direction Of Performance ManagementPilot Software Drives New Direction Of Performance Management

Deploying performance management throughout a company creates lasting value, but it is not a simple task. It requires an iterative approach. Pilot Software has been providing software solutions for this approach for over two decades. Pilot has a background in marketing and sales analysis and has evolved to a business intelligence-based operational performance management approach. Organizations leverage Pilot Software to improve top line growth with a more disciplined approach to sales, marketing, and service. Ventana Research directs organizations to adopt the strategic rigor of performance management to drive new levels of effectiveness with operational performance management.

Assessment

Pilot Software is a provider of performance management software solutions with more than a twenty-year history in the decision support market. Pilot specializes in giving customer, supply chain, and product organizations the ability to link objectives for synchronizing and managing performance to a set of goals, objectives, and quantitative metrics. Pilot Software has leveraged its successes with customers globally to become a market player in what Ventana Research defines as operational performance management (see Operational Performance Management).

Pilot Software basis its performance management solution suite on a customizable application called PilotWorks, which has the ability to adapt and deploy formal and customized scorecarding methodologies. It provides strategy plans, initiative management, scorecards, dashboards, reporting & analysis, and modeling & integration. PilotWorks leverages its analysis and reporting component to navigate detailed analysis. A critical component of Pilot's success is its support of a variety of methodologies from Total Quality Management™, Pay for Performance, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, and others. This practical approach goes beyond the academic methodology of Balanced Scorecard to enable organizations to effectively run their businesses in the real world. The Ventana Research Operational Performance Management Study shows that internally developed and industry benchmarking are most often used rather than methodologies like Balanced Scorecard.

Pilot leverages its analysis and reporting component to provide business analysts and sophisticated business users with the ability to perform analysis at a more detailed level. These applications are built on top of the Pilot server, which is a robust, multi-dimensional analysis environment featuring what Pilot calls Time Intelligence™. This provides Pilot a unique advantage in supporting performance management. It can conduct iterative analysis and deliver performance metrics through time series analysis. Pilot also provides the ability to build custom applications and a modeling & integration component for data integration into operational and legacy systems.

Pilot's product suite rates favorably in the Ventana Research Performance Cycle. The suite provides a solution framework that includes strategy plans, initiative management, scorecards, dashboards, reporting & analysis, and modeling & integration. Organizations requiring a more formalized reporting framework will have to examine other third-party solutions like Actuate, BusinessObjects, or Cognos.

Market Impact

Pilot has evolved into a sophisticated provider of applications and tools for enabling operational performance management. The simplicity in its approach, and its focus on line of business, provides Pilot with growth opportunities well beyond traditional BI that focus pre-dominantly on centralized IT. Pilot has gained a competitive advantage with its approach, its focus on sales, service and marketing across channels, and its platform for building customized applications, dashboards, and enterprise scorecards.

Because many of the current scorecarding vendors have had significant challenges trying to maintain and grow their operations, and because most BI providers are focused on enterprise BI and reporting for the CIO and IT managers, line of business is left looking for solutions. The shift by many global corporations away from their existing ERP providers towards a separate line-of-business performance management provider is now driving new business to Pilot Software.

Recommendation

The recent shift in the enterprise software industry to a 'back to the basics' approach has created a push towards performance management. The focus on bringing systems that are adaptable, customizable, and deployable in an iterative fashion will improve the performance of people within their operational processes. Companies should examine IT investments that can truly balance efficiency and effectiveness.

As organizations look to drive sustained top line growth, they must adopt performance management to ensure optimal execution of their business strategy. Ventana Research recommends that organizations looking to adopt diverse methodologies for synchronizing operational performance without heavy IT involvement in their organization examine Pilot Software. Pilot's background in sales and marketing and its focus in performance management brings a powerful combination to line of business. Success in the next decade will depend on operational performance management to improve the effectiveness of people and processes.