Using an Integrated Management System (IMS) to Drive Business Success

Businesses traditionally evolve over a period of time, and introduce different back end, or transaction processing systems at different stages of its evolution, depending on its needs. So they may have a suite of, for e.g. ERP, CRM, Core Banking, and other applications critical to running its day to day transactions. On top of these applications, organizations usually evolve into the use of BI or Corporate Performance Applications. Inevitably this has lead to duplication of effort in maintaining the same information in multiple systems, unnecessary cost, a lack of information transparency and inability to timely provide managers with quality information to base their decisions on. Ensuring success in achieving organizational goals on a sustainable basis, requires firm control over managing your strategy and operations. It is critical to create a single integrated system, to report from these multiple applications and provide the management unified information on which to base critical decisions. These decisions will need input from one or more of the following management frameworks running within the organization.

What is an Integrated Management System?

   * Strategy Management System - describes the mid-to-long term plan of action of the organization

   * Business Process Management - describes the actions being executed and documents how the organization does things

   * Business Performance Management - monitors how well the organization is doing things.

   * Quality Management - ensures the organization delivers value to its customers.

   * Risk & Compliance Management - ensures that the organization has identified possible risks, and is prepared for them. Deploying an IMS allows organizations to migrate towards a management system that treats strategy, performance, risk, compliance, process, and quality as interdependent enablers of achieving organizational goals, allowing them to be managed in a unified, systematic way to optimize results.

Key benefits that accrue from running an IMS are as follows:

   * Integrate all components of managing your organization into one coherent system, executed cross-functionally and in a systematic way

   * Align all management practices with your strategy

   * Improve processes from a holistic viewpoint that includes besides performance also risk, compliance and quality mandates

   * Improve decision making by providing managers with shorter reporting cycles and a single point of access to all information, structured in a systematic and uniform way

   * Reduce the cost of audits and compliance by providing a uniform approach to manage compliance with a multitude of regulations and standards, rather than managing each regulation in an isolated way

   * Involve your employees in the collaborative execution of strategy, performance, risk, quality and compliance management.