Many organizations that use SAP are far from where they want and need to be with improving their performance. They typically apply intuition and externally oriented financial information, rather than information designed for internal decision support, when making decisions.

To address this problem a non-profit Profitability Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) was created. PACE is based on a framework that integrates revenue management, capital and intangible investment management, and managerial costing. The framework provides a roadmap for finance to support strategy formulation, validate strategy with operational and financial models, improve the quality of strategy execution, and support strategy evaluation for continuous improvement. The result is improved forecasting and decision making.

Foundational to the PACE framework is the “causality principle” which is the basis of scientific insight, including decision science, as it applies to economic, financial, and operational decisions. Effective economic modeling is essential for all of the enterprise and corporate performance management tools.These include: a strategy maps and its companion balanced scorecard; product, service line, channel, and customer profitability analysis; capacity-sensitive driver-based budgets and rolling financial forecasts; enterprise risk management; supply chain management; and lean and Six Sigma quality management for operational improvement. Each method should be embedded with advanced business analytics of all flavors.