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Cutting Out Guesswork | Intelligent Enterprise Blog
Cutting Out Guesswork

Posted by ted kemp
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
4:42 PM

Performance management software can help business managers decide when to do things, yes. But it can also tell managers when not to do things.

Just ask Occidental Petroleum. The energy giant suffered two whammy disasters this year -- by the names of Katrina and Rita -- and it had a decision to make. It didn't want to know how to get its knocked-out Gulf of Mexico oil rig up and running the quickest. It wanted to know when it should recommence operations at the lowest cost.

The faster Occidental returned the rig to operation, the higher of a premium it would have to pay contractors and their crews who would bring the facility back online. But every day of waiting also meant lost revenue as the rig floated idle.

Occidental used a business performance management tool to balance the cost of not acting versus the cost of acting quickly. It did so by running hourly trending and benchmarking updates -- though in normal times the company would run such reports only once a month.

The practice of performance management is about removing guesswork. Sometimes, that means sitting on your hands for a little while -- or sitting patiently in front of a performance management dashboard -- rather than jumping the gun.



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