Integrated Performance Measures
Integrated Performance Measures (IPM) has been the main focus of my development activities for the last eight years. It's a difficult product to describe and gave our marketing people a real headache when it came to producing a brochure.
Essentially it's a business modeling tool. That's where we started out with it and that's what it still does. However, it's been used in many different ways for many different applications since we started and restricting it to a specific use in this way is unfair.
When we first wrote IPM, it was used to communicate business plans throughout an organisation. It allowed us to present complex business plans in a simple, hierarchical way, allowing everyone in the organisation to see clearly where they fitted in and how they had influence in the future of their organisation.
Simple calculation abilities allowed the financial people to play with the numbers and run what-if scenarios to predict the effects of change.
For a while, this was exactly what IPM was used for and it did it's job well, with clients making savings where they did not previously see any and others abandoning plans that they thought profitable but subsequently saw to be too risky. Company initiatives were streamlined and focus shifted to those that gave the most return.
IPM was sold in to some large organisations, such as BP, Pilkingtons, Courtaulds, the MoD to name but a few. It was used for business planning but was not limited to just planning. One client, much to our surprise, used the software to model a chemical reaction to try to find out why it wouldn't start!
While IPM sold, it did not sell well. The effort required to build the models was perceived as being too hard and many organisations didn't want to put the effort in when they had bigger problems to solve (ironically, problems that IPM could have solved for them).
IPM is now used largely as an internal consulting tool for Lucidus and for the clients we work with. It's focus has switched to a sales aid that allows organisations to clearly articulate the benefits of their products and allows the customer to track the delivery of the benefits promised. This is expressed in the Lucidus offerings Value Based Selling & Delivery, Value Assessment, Tracking and Release and Value based Outsourcing.
The client list is no less impressive, with talks going on with QAD, Amdahl, Fujitsu, Invensys and others.
Personally, I think IPM is a great tool and that's not just because I wrote the code! I've seen what people have done with IPM and I've been astounded While I know what it's capable of I never cease to find it amazing what people model with the software.