Formed in 1966, Comshare is the oldest online analytic processing (OLAP) vendor providing business solutions in the business performance management (BPM) market space. Comshare currently offers three main products: FDC, a stand-alone application for financial consolidation, statutory, and management reporting; Decision, a development environment for building custom Web-based business intelligence applications that provides the user interface for Comshare MPC; and MPC, Comshare's flagship BPM solution.

MPC 5.0, released in October 2002, supports a closed-loop approach to BPM. Key product enhancements include employee- and asset-level budgeting, improved financial consolidation, and tighter integration with Microsoft's Business Intelligence platform.

Closed-Loop Financial Process

BPM applications support a wide range of business processes, including strategic planning, budgeting, financial consolidation, forecasting, and management reporting and analysis. At their best, these applications support a closed-loop management process, which ties strategic plans to operational budgets and allows organizations to continually monitor — and improve — resource deployment in support of corporate objectives.

A financially intelligent, Web-based solution, Comshare MPC supports this closed-loop approach by combining all the BPM functionality organizations need to manage and control their businesses into a single, integrated application. With Comshare MPC, organizations can model business plans, link strategies to budgets, automate global financial consolidation, generate statistically accurate budgets and plans, and report and analyze data in meaningful ways. This planning, forecasting, reporting, analysis, and adjustment loop enables managers to drive key business objectives throughout their organizations, quickly identify and correct key variances, and adjust strategies and reforecast results in real time.

Application Architecture

Comshare MPC isn't restricted to working with a particular database and can be deployed on both relational and multidimensional platforms. (Figure 1 shows a high-level overview of the MPC product architecture.) In fact, Comshare MPC's Application Services module lets the product integrate with today's most popular technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Analysis Services, Oracle RDBMS, and Hyperion Essbase. (Starting in January 2003, Comshare stopped reselling Hyperion Essbase. However, Comshare will still support clients using Essbase.)

This database agnosticism lets Comshare clients leverage existing investments in technology infrastructure and skill sets, simplifying maintenance and minimizing training needs.

Modular Approach

Historically, BPM solutions have been put together using disparate applications, often on multiple or proprietary databases. Comshare MPC, in contrast, is a single, modular application running on a central database. This level of integration gives the product a consistent look and feel and differentiates it from competitors such as Hyperion Solutions Corp. (Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management) and Oracle (Oracle Financial Analyzer), whose solutions require multiple products to provide the same range of functionality or address only a subset of BPM functions.

Comshare MPC consists of five interrelated modules.

Planning. The Planning module is aimed at financial planning power users and offers several features to support the strategic planning process. Business models can be developed and used to view the organization from different perspectives such as legal entity, product, market, time, and so on. You can perform what-if analysis by modifying business assumptions (inputs), such as exploring the effects of increasing gross sales by 10 or 15 percent on earnings per share. You can save the results of the what-if analysis locally (in a proprietary file on the user's PC) before submitting it to the central database.

In addition to modifying inputs, Goal Seeking, one of the module features, lets you work backward from a calculated number to determine the inputs required to meet specific goals. In this way, you can produce top-down plans for all organizational units and compare them to the bottom-up plans produced during the budget process.

Budget. The Budget module supports an iterative bottom-up budgeting process. You can seed an initial budget by copying prior-year data or by statistical forecasting. (See the following Forecasting module section.) Text views communicate relevant information to budget holders, such as key financial objectives and the budget-process timetable. Manual data entry is performed using schedule-based views that let different users plan in business units that are meaningful to them. Plant managers might want to plan using product volumes, for instance, while finance managers will want to plan revenue and expense items in local currency.

The module can accept data entered directly via the Web, and tools are available to clear, spread, and increase or decrease selected data values. You can add notes and, if necessary, apply them to specific cells to provide more information.

For users who prefer to remain in Excel, an add-in lets them enter and submit budget data (but not text) directly from Excel. The add-in is comparable to others on the market and, like most, can be used to perform analysis using standard Excel functionality directly against the application database.