Today’s dynamic markets and technologies have brought in the question of long-term sustainability and competitive advantage. Under pressure to improve productivity, quality, and speed, managers have embraced tools such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Balanced Scorecard (BSC), Benchmarking, and Process Re-engineering. Operational improvements have been noticed along the past years, however these gains have hardly translated into sustainable profitability. Unfortunately these management tools have gradually taken the place of strategy. As management strives to improve on all fronts, they move further away from viable competitive and strategic positions. The essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in structures of activities that are more difficult to balance.

Together with several well-known authors in the recognized literature, we believe that the foundation of competitive advantage should be drilled down to the level of the specific activities a company performs. Whereas today’s managers focus on individual components of success such as core competencies or critical resources, we suggest a framework that could be applied and fit across any type of company. While stressing the role of leadership in making and enforcing clear strategic choices, we offers a robust performance model on how companies can reconnect with strategies that have become blurred over time.

Our top-notch Optimal Partial Least Square (OPLS) tool is summarizing the company’s strategy and translates it into an optimal structure to enhance performance management. One of the main features of our OPLS tool is that it groups the performance indicators into clusters of strategic perspectives and it identifies the cause-and-effect relations between these strategic perspectives of the organization. The essence of our model is allowing financial and non-financial data to be used to predict future organizational performance using an optimally generated model, so that management can shape the proper strategy of the company.

Using historical data gathered from inside the company and applying a combination of statistical techniques (Clustering, Principal Component Analysis, Factor Analysis, Partial Least Squares, Bootstrapping, etc) our OPLS tool is capable of:

• translating the data into an easy-to-use structure for better integration, communication and long-term management;
• highlighting the key performance indicators that have the capacity to capture the most relevant information from the company;
• assembling key performance indicators into distinct strategic perspectives (or strategic axes) capable of summarizing company information in a convenient way;
• establishing the optimal relations between strategic perspectives in a cause-and-effect link that emphasizes the interactions taking place at the strategic level, helping in this way to better understand and spotlight the company’s strengths and weaknesses;
• availing the dynamic evolution of the organization and improving the forecast to better control, monitor and report on the main elements of any company.