The Profit Impact of Market Strategy (PIMS) program is a project that uses empirical data to try to determine which business strategies make the difference between success and failure. It is used to develop strategies for resource allocation and marketing. Some of the most important strategic metrics are market share, product quality, investment intensity and service quality (all measured by PIMS and strongly correlated with financial performance). One of the emphasized principles is that the same factors work identically across different industries. The business management authors Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote that PIMS "yields solid evidence in support of both common sense and counter-intuitive principles for gaining and sustaining competitive advantage". History The PIMS project was originally initiated by senior managers of General Electric who wanted to know why some of their business units were more profitable than others. Under the direction of Sidney Schoeffler, an Economics Professor hired by GE for the purpose, the PIMS project was launched in the 1960s as an internal empirical study. The aim was to make GE's different strategic business units (SBUs) comparable. Since GE was highly diversified at the time, key factors were sought that would have an impact on economic success regardless of the product. In particular, the return on investment (ROI), i.e. the profit per unit of tied capital, was used as the measure of success. In 1972, the project was transferred to the Marketing Sciences Institute (then under the wing of Harvard Business School, which extended it to other companies. In 1976, the American Strategic Planning Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took charge of the project. Between 1970 and 1983, roughly 2600 strategic business units (SBUs) from around 200 companies took part in the surveys and provided key figures for the project. Today there are around 12,570 observations for 4200 SBUs. PIMS Associates in London has been the worldwide competence and design canter for PIMS since the 1990s and has been part of Malik Management (Fredmund Malik) in St. Gallen (Switzerland) since 2005. The PIMS project analyses the data they had gathered to identify the options, problems, resources and opportunities faced by each SBU. Based on the spread of each business across different industries, it was hoped that the data could be drawn upon to provide other businesses, in the same industry, with empirical evidence of which strategies lead to increased profitability. The database continues to be updated and drawn