With this year's economic outlook still shaky, executives are increasingly turning their analyses inward--and they want business-intelligence tools to help them and their employees scrutinize business processes to cut costs and operate more efficiently.

Vendors are responding. This year will see a flood of new and updated business-intelligence software for evaluating all facets of business, from finances to supply-chain operations to sales efforts. That's a change from recent years, when the No. 1 mission of business-intelligence systems was analyzing customer data in hopes of wringing out more sales. And, unlike applications built solely to deliver information to top management, the new tools are designed for a broad swath of users, including midlevel managers and even workers in the trenches.

Many of the business-intelligence applications set to debut are designed to enable enterprise performance management. Think of EPM as the place where strategy and planning meet execution and measurement, helping managers monitor business processes and then use that insight to improve them. Business technologists hope to use EPM to get more value out of the enterprise resource planning and customer-relationship management systems they spent millions of dollars to install.

A company might improve its ability to predict demand for products for the coming year, then feed that data through its financial-planning, supply-chain, and production systems. Or it could eyeball its procurement operation to decide whether buying from one supplier or multiple vendors makes more economic sense.

Business Objects SA's most important new product this year is likely to be Sundance, an application that promises to capture business-intelligence best practices, monitor performance metrics, and disseminate information throughout a company. For example, using Sundance, a business will be able to create a collaborative system for developing sales forecasts and tracking actual sales against those forecasts. Due out in the first half of the year, the software could help close the loop between setting goals and monitoring business performance to meet those goals. "It's going to put business intelligence in a very different light," CEO Bernard Liautaud says.

Corporate dashboards or "cockpits"--customizable screens that give a snapshot view of a company's critical operations--play a key role in enterprise performance management. Dashboards have been around for years, but business-intelligence vendors are making them an integrated component of their software so it's easier to build, deploy, and use them. By midyear, Business Objects will ship a version of its Application Foundation tool, for running packaged analytical applications or building custom apps, that includes tools and templates for creating dashboards.

Penske Logistics, a longtime customer of Business Objects' query and reporting software, may adopt the vendor's analytical applications this year because of the new capabilities. "They allow a user to be more interactive with the data, not just get reports," says Tom Nather, a senior systems analyst in the data warehouse group at the supply-chain management services subsidiary of Penske Corp. A warehouse manager could use such a dashboard to check shipping volumes daily, for example. "They want to come in, look at their dashboard, and make more proactive decisions," Nather says.

Cognos Inc. will continue a push into what it calls corporate performance management by building tighter links between its Metrics Manager scorecard software and its financial and analytical applications. That will help managers measure financial performance against business goals.

Brio Software Inc. this month plans to ship an upgrade of its Brio Metrics Builder for developing analytical applications with key performance indicators. The 7.1 release will have more alerts that warn managers when, say, inventory levels are too low or production is falling.