Business Performance Management A Modular ProposalComshare MPC offers a unified suite of BPM modules that's database-agnosticby Paul Dean Continued from Page 1 Two additional budget components are included. The first, Salary Planning, can be performed at an individual employee level. You can allocate employee costs not just by department or cost center, but also across additional dimensions such as project or activity. Thus, Comshare MPC supports project profitability analysis. You can also calculate depreciation and net book values based on predefined asset profiles to support the last budget component: Asset Budgeting.
Consolidation. The Consolidation module is for closing the books. It provides all the necessary functions, such as multicurrency conversions, intercompany eliminations, and audit trails. The consolidation module contains a data-mapping tool used to map different source systems and supports the loading and consolidation of data for disparate organizations that have multiple charts of accounts, general ledgers, and timing structures. This mapping tool can also be used to load data from other sources, such as CRM, ERP, and legacy applications. Forecasting. The Forecasting module provides a range of time-series forecasting techniques — including Holt-Winters, exponential smoothing, and Box-Jenkins — that you can apply to historical data to generate a statistically accurate forecast based on previous business trends. Multiple combinations of business dimensions (unit, product, sales channel, and so on) can be forecast at the same time; for each historical data series Comshare MPC automatically uses the technique that will generate the best statistical fit. In this way, the forecasting module could be used to seed individual budgets for all budget holders based on history. Automatic rolling forecasts can also be generated as actuals are loaded and compared to plan. Management Reporting/Analysis. The Management Reporting/Analysis module is accessible from all other modules and lets users analyze data and text information in views and charts. The data views have the usual OLAP functionality, including drill down, rotate, color coding, the ability to sort the view by specific column, perform on-screen calculations, and save a personal version. Views can also be configured to drill through to underlying transaction detail, such as general ledger journal entries. Supported charting types include bar, area, line, pie, and scatter — each with extensive formatting options. Two additional visualization methods, OverView and Exception Alerts, differentiate Comshare MPC (and the underlying Decision technology). OverView appears as a hyperbolic tree and can display hundreds or thousands of data points in a color-coded view. As the user moves the mouse over the tree, the area under the mouse expands to reveal lower-level hierarchy detail, such as individual SKUs that compose a product line. You can change the orientation of the view to continue analysis along a different dimension. Suppose the analysis indicates an adverse gross margin variance for an individual product. You could rotate the view to display all sales territories for this product to determine if the adverse variance is across the board or isolated to a specific territory. The user can modify the color-coding thresholds by sliding coding bars to more easily identify high or low performers. The budget manager can also use OverView to see the status of the budget process for individual budget holders. Different colors indicate if budgets have been submitted, approved, or rejected. Figure 2 shows an example of the hyperbolic tree. Exception Alerts can be defined by the end user to identify individual cells that meet specific criteria. For example, individual business units that had budgeted operating expenses higher than the corporate forecast can be listed as a series of records showing the data value along with the associated keys or dimension values. Optional ModulesTwo add-on modules are also offered. The Production Reporting module uses Crystal Reports and automates the process of producing, distributing, and maintaining highly formatted reports. Report templates are provided, and new templates can be created with the Crystal Reports designer. The templates are associated with views of the data to create multiple reports that can be consolidated into books. Reports can be generated in Crystal Reports, HTML, or Excel formats. Using PDAs running Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system, the Pocket Analytix module provides timely read/write access and email alerts to mobile users. A salesperson can immediately update a forecast instead of waiting to get back to the office. However, with the limited screen size of PDAs, the practicality of performing analysis on them is questionable. Implementation And AdministrationComshare MPC is an enterprise-level application and is typically implemented by Comshare's professional services or third-party consulting organizations. The duration of an implementation can range from a few weeks to several months depending on the complexity of the business process being implemented and the modules being deployed. The application administrator uses the View Manager tool to specify which modules and data each user or group of users can access. For example, an operational manager responsible for entering the budget for his department might be given access to just the Budget and Reporting/Analysis modules. Sophisticated, BroadComshare MPC is a sophisticated application with an intuitive user interface that provides a broad range of functionality to address enterprise-level financial management, planning, and control applications. Companies seeking an integrated application with flexible database-server implementation options would do well to look at this product. Paul Dean [pldean@sbcglobal.net or 312-636-1980] is an independent OLAP consultant.
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
