The Cockpit has now been launched in the Asia Pacific, with Origin being the sole authorised implementor in the region. This was announced at the Saphhire 99 Conference held in Singapore last week. Says Jean-Pierre Deruddere, managing director, Origin Asia Pacific, ``We have already implemented an MC at our office in Singapore and are in the final stages of servicing a customer in Indonesia.'' According to Origin officials, some Indian companies have shown interest in the MC.

Here's how the concept works: Think of the MC essentially as a strategic management room with visual fields on the three walls of the room. Each wall provides simple information on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by using modern technologies, such as datawarehouses, Internet and ERP softwares, all of which are interfaced with the MC programme.

So, while MC Workplaces organises knowledge by activities, MC Walls organises information by major concerns, and MC Logical Views organises key performance indicators by management questions, and the MC Visuals organises data by synthesis levels.

The attempt, says Georges, who spoke to The Financial Express at the conference, is to provide information of greater relevance for a balanced scoreboard. The MC claims to make the balanced scoreboard work. The room imparts information in the form of questions and answers, and arranges them in KPI sets of six around the room. Says Georges, ``What gets measured, gets done.'' Connnecting ergonomics with human intelligence, Georges has thus innovated on creating ergonomic visuals for decision support systems.

According to him, the human brain cannot take more than six discreet pieces of visual information. Therefore, the KPIs come in blocks of six. Each wall has six primary KPIs and together provide three different levels of visual synthesis. ``What we were driving was more of a war room than just a panel of computer screens,'' says Georges. In this way, he maintains, top management can simplify and consolidate information at the same time, at a previously determined visual field on different sections of the wall.

According to Georges, the MC thus brings three major enhancements for your management control: A better information presentation, a better information relevance and a better business content around your own information.

He claims that enhanced information presentation drives people to act. ``When you enter the MC Room, you see the business, you know in a minute what's good and what's bad. The big picture and the eye-catching meaning of information deliver a clear message and a strong drive to act to everybody,'' says Georges.

The MC presents more non-finance information for a long-term view, more hot news and business intelligence to monitor customers and competitor's moves, more early warning to show upcoming problems before they hurt the finance figures, more project visual status to decide quickly if you should intervene or not, claims Georges.

The Management Cockpit is a registered trademark of SAP AG, originally created by Georges and delivered by N.E.T. Research, which designs, installs and operates MCs worldwide. It was founded in 1988 in Brussels, Belgium, by brain surgeons, computer professionals and specialists in human intelligence and decision-making.

Georges is currently the Director of the International Institute for Human Intelligence Management at HEC School of Management in Paris. He is regarded as the leading authority in the field of human productivity and human intelligence.

He coined the term `business ergonomics', which he uses to explain why companies need to adapt work to human intelligence physiology to achieve more creativity and productivity from their top managers. The only brain surgeon ever to appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Georges founded N.E.T. Research with specialists in brain sciences and computer sciences to apply the fast growing knowledge on human intelligence to serve corporations. His management course, `The Intelligent Organization', is also popular among top executives in Europe.