Now that Merced offers both sales AND service performance management, a lot of people have been asking me what performance management really means - how does Merced do it and what do we offer that existing players in the market, both service performance management and incentive compensation vendors, do not? What makes performance management different from business intelligence?

So I'd like to highlight three things that have made us successful with customers and unique in the market:

First, we keep reporting projects aligned with what matters to our customers' businesses.

Many performance management projects start out as or are closely related to a reporting project. To make a performance management project successful, it is imperative that each aspect of the initiative be tied to overarching company objectives.  Therefore, at Merced, we not only automate and streamline the reporting process, we also ensure that an operation's reporting is closely aligned with its guiding business strategy.  At a very fundamental level, companies must deliver a great customer experience at a low cost. Merced's performance management applications are unique because they close the loop between reporting processes and actual behavior change at the front line, ultimately leading to improved customer satisfaction, whereas other vendors, specifically in the BI space, stop at reporting.

Second, we understand the reality of the details in these environments.

Merced lives and breathes the challenges of getting, cleansing, organizing and presenting data.  We get the challenges supervisors and managers face in managing in these complex operating environments - the difficulty of getting to the root cause of problems and then making real changes.  We've been doing this for 7 years now.

Third, we focus on the human factor.

We don't just live in data and reporting.  We blend our expertise with a human side - the side where operational improvements are actually made, and customer relationships positively affected. We have built best practices into each of our applications - from how supervisors should approach coaching, to how business owners should incent employees.  It is this human factor that we build into our products which makes them work.

The devil really is in the details, and it is indeed our attention to detail that has made both our company and our customers successful over the last 7 years.