In today’s business world, enterprises have to meet the advanced demands for greener, more customized and higher quality products. This means they have to focus on smaller and more specific market segments of customer oriented products. Mass production is turning into ‘mass customization’, which can be defined as offering customized goods at a price close to that of mass production.
SuccessFactors, Inc., a global company specialized in business execution software, recently published the results of the study “How Companies Leverage Business Execution Software to Drive Excess Shareholder Return”, completed in collaboration with The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. This study shows that companies tend to achieve higher industry-adjusted stock returns when they set and align goals, rate users on the achievement of these goals, used more variance in performance feedback, and leverage business execution software to increase their ability to execute (SuccessFactors, 2011).
We live in a time when sustainability is becoming a rising priority for companies as a vast number of stakeholder groups such as investors, management and employees try to understand the social and environmental implications of the company’s operational and financial activities and decisions. Sustainability has become “both a strategic imperative and a performance driver” that strives to maximize business impact (Gorbach, 2009)