Metrics Management uses measures to store, calculate, and display performance management data. Measure data captures the performance information for an organization. Measures are the primary building blocks with which to expose and analyze performance issues in books, maps, and views. Before creating measures, the system specialist creates the infrastructure that supports measures. The primary supporting objects are categories, templates, users, user groups, and locations.

Categories are labels that group other objects. Best practice is to decide the category types for an object before creating multiple objects. For example, before setting up users the system specialist decides that Asia, Europe, and North America categories are required. When creating the first North American user, the system specialist creates the North America category.

Templates define standard values for properties of an object type, such as users or measures. Templates save significant time for the system specialist when creating multiple objects. For example, the View Only User template defines privileges as view only for Metrics Management objects.

Users identify individuals who use Metrics Management. Locations and measures require a user as an object owner. For this reason, the system specialist creates users before creating locations and measures. For example, the European CFO user can be defined as the owner of the European location. Users can be grouped. User groups support defining privileges for multiple users. For example, the executive user group can view and open a book, but not edit or delete the book.

Locations define the organizational or geographical dimension of measures. For this reason, locations are created before measures. A measure has one or more locations. In many cases, organizations track performance of a measure at multiple locations. For example, the Overall Performance measure tracks performance at multiple locations, including AsiaPac and Call Center.