BPM Partners to Offer a Preview of New Industry-Specific Dashboards at DCI Performance Management Conference.

High-Tech Writers

DCI Performance Management

Booth #305

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 2003

Independent Authority on Performance Management to Offer New

Option for Jump-Starting BPM Implementations

BPM Partners, the leading independent authority on business performance management (BPM) solutions, today offered a sneak peek at the products it is creating to further increase the speed by which companies can deploy BPM solutions and then reap the resulting return on investment.

The new BPM Partners' Industry Expert (IndEx) Packs, scheduled to launch in January 2004, provide industry-specific, Web-based, packaged dashboards pre-populated with best practice metrics and measures. The dashboards will work with a wide variety of industry standard BPM applications and maintain BPM Partners' status as an objective, vendor-neutral, consultant dedicated to providing clients with the best match between their specific needs and the existing vendor offerings.

A dashboard is a user interface that resembles an automobile dashboard and organizes and presents information in a way that is easy to read, understand and act upon. A performance management dashboard provides the ability to integrate information from multiple applications into a unified display that looks as though it all came from the same source. BPM Partners intends to deliver industry-specific dashboards (IndEx Packs) for all major industries by utilizing its unique experience in the BPM arena and partnering with leading companies in each industry.

The BPM Partners IndEx Packs will come complete with pre-built charts, graphs and gauges as well as predefined metrics, both cross-industry and industry-specific. Each package also provides the ability to include metrics that are unique to a company's specific strategic objectives. The metrics support existing performance management methodologies such as Balanced Scorecard, Malcolm Baldridge, Six Sigma, etc.

"Determining your key business drivers and associated metrics is a difficult and time consuming process. Our experience shows us that up to 80 percent of the metrics a company wishes to measure as part of its BPM initiative are the same as those found in other like organizations," said Craig Schiff, president and CEO of BPM Partners. "By prepackaging the standard industry metrics, IndEx Packs allow a company to focus on the metrics that are unique to their business. This minimizes the project's expense and maximizes the return on investment."

BPM is a combination of business processes, select measures (metrics, key performance indicators) and systems that enable an organization to understand, act on and influence its business performance. Budgeting, planning, consolidation, scorecards, dashboards, business intelligence (BI) and analytic applications all fall under the BPM umbrella. In addition, regulatory issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, and IAS 2005 compliance are often business drivers for today's BPM applications.

BPM Partners is a vendor-neutral consultancy working with Fortune 1000 clients directly to develop requirements for BPM initiatives, evaluate and map vendor offerings to the project specifications and implement BPM activities globally.

"By working with BPM Partners to create performance management dashboards for our customers in the advertising and entertainment industries, we will be able to focus our efforts on the measures unique to the organization, confident we won't waste time and our client's budget re-inventing the wheel," said BPM expert Dr. Chris Iervolino of ITEC Corporation. "The use of a BPM Partners packaged dashboard will hasten the completion of our BPM projects, and guarantee early results and return on investment."

The BPM Partners IndEx Packs will be built on the Curl Application Framework (CAF) from Curl Corporation (Cambridge, MA). This choice is based upon the flexibility of the Curl framework and its powerful data visualization capabilities. This technology allows users to easily combine raw data from multiple sources such as data warehouses, legacy systems and other performance management applications.

About BPM Partners

BPM Partners is the leading independent authority on business performance management (BPM) solutions. BPM Partners' vendor-neutral consultants guide companies through their BPM initiatives from start to finish, helping companies attain the maximum value from their business performance management initiatives. This is done through hands-on services that provide insight on how to collect and analyze the right information to address specific business goals. BPM Partners leads clients through vendor selection, evaluation and implementation of departmental or enterprise-wide BPM systems.

By analyzing and then matching the client's requirements with the appropriate vendor, BPM Partners helps companies narrow the selection of vendors from a lengthy industry list that includes Applix (Nasdaq: APLX), Cartesis, Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN), Computer Associates (NYSE: CA), Comshare (TSE:GAC), FRx Software, Hyperion (Nasdaq: HYSL), Longview Solutions, OutlookSoft, PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT), SAP (NYSE: SAP), SAS, SRC Software and others. For further details, go to www.bpmpartners.com.