Business Performance Management (BPM) involves consolidation of data from various sources, querying, and analysis of the data, and putting the results into practice. It enhances processes by creating better feedback loops. Continuous and real-time reviews help to identify and eliminate problems before they grow. BPM's forecasting abilities help the company take corrective action in time to meet earnings projections. Forecasting is characterised by a high degree of predictability which is put into good use to answer what-if scenarios. BPM is useful in risk analysis and predicting outcomes of merger and acquisition scenarios and coming up with a plan to overcome potential problems.

BPM provides key performance indicators (KPIs) that help companies monitor efficiency of projects and employees against operational targets.

BPM is also known as Corporate, Enterprise and Operational performance management. Itis a set of processes that help organizations optimise their business performance. It is a framework for organising, automating and analysing business methodologies, metrics, processes and systems that drive business performance.

BPM is seen as the next generation of business intelligence (BI). BPM helps businesses make efficient use of their financial, human, material and other resources.

For years, owners have sought to drive strategy down and across their organizations, they have struggled to transform strategies into actionable metrics and they have grappled with meaningful analysis to expose the cause-and-effect relationships that, if understood, could give profitable insight to their operational decision makers.

Now corporate performance management (CPM) software and methods allow a systematic, integrated approach that links enterprise strategy to core processes and activities. “Running by the numbers” now means something as planning, budgeting, analysis and reporting can give the measurements that empower management decisions.