PerformancePont Planning Software by Microsoft

Microsoft PerformancePoint software is the only performance management software solution that provides financial and operational reporting integrated with Excel, dashboard, and analytics in a single solution.  All of this is delivered at a level of investment that makes possible Microsoft’s vision of providing business insight to every person that can benefit from it.

Description of PerformancePoint Software

PerformancePoint is an integrated performance management software application that provides robust consolidation, monitoring, analytics, and planning capabilities. PerformancePoint will allow you to articulate goals, monitor business activity, identify and analyze issues, and collaborate and take action.

PerformancePoint is a single product that has three facets, Planning, Monitoring, and Analytics.  Consolidation functionality resides primarily in the ‘Planning’ parts of the product but reporting can be done through any of them.  When Microsoft refers to ‘Planning’, that includes the consolidation functionality for financial consolidation, budgeting, modeling, and reporting.

Management Reporting and Consolidation with PerformancePoint Planning

Management reporting plays a key role in performance management. Displaying the results, performing variance analysis, comparing projections, and consolidating data from disparate sources will provide your users with the business intelligence they need to make timely and relevant decisions.

PerformancePoint is built on the powerful Microsoft SQL Server platform and integrated with the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office environment.  PerformancePoint provides data in real time from a single, centrally managed source. Information is up to date, consistent and can combine operational and financial data into a single report.

PerformancePoint Benefits

You will benefit from the easy-to-use and powerful reporting functionality in PerformancePoint, including:

·      Cross-enterprise business view - The SQL Server Business Intelligence platform will integrate information from many different sources and systems including your ERP and other systems to provide a complete perspective of business performance across the enterprise and from multiple hierarchies (current and historical).

·      Easy mass distribution - Widely distribute dynamic and standard reports including financial statements, management reports, and ad-hoc analysis to your decision-makers who need this information.

·      Strong support for regulatory compliance - PerformancePoint Planningsupports generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), international financial reporting standards (IFRS), and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. Centralized management, including security and auditing of business rules, spreadsheets, and scorecards, simplifies regulatory compliance.

·      Empowers people with self service reporting and analysis – Users can create their own reports so IT can focus their efforts on providing the right infrastructure and data to access richer, more targeted information.

·      Drives consistency throughout performance management processes - Server-side business rules and real-time calculations scale to support a wide range of users with consistent processes and data, and simplify the consolidation of multiple data sets into a corporate rollup. Data entry forms, workflow, submissions, approvals, templates, and other forms streamline the consolidation, planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes.

·      Accommodates simple and complex models and movement of data between models - PerformancePoint Planning supports simple business models and enterprise-level scenarios by compartmentalizing data and processes. It then uses its unique model-to-model mapping capabilities to move only the data required to other models that require that data.

·      Extends your Microsoft investment - Users benefit from the power and familiarity of Microsoft Office, Excel, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, as well as from the performance, scalability, and enhanced security of SQL Server.  PerformancePoint also integrates with Microsoft Project Server and will significantly extend your project management capabilities.

Key Features of PerformancePoint Planning

These key features of PerformancePoint simplify reporting:

·      Integration with Microsoft Office Excel - Build, customize, and share production-quality reports from Excel while being connected to the security-enhanced, centrally managed server.

·      Easy customization - Templates and forms enable users to create and distribute customized reports accurately, quickly, and easily.

·      Enterprise-grade statutory consolidation functionality – PerformancePoint Planning produces statutory consolidation including multicurrency conversions, intercompany eliminations, reconciliations, and multi-tier allocations.

·      Advanced financial intelligence - Turn advanced financial analysis such as sensitivity and variance analysis (for example, price/quantity/customer/product mix/timing) into easy-to-understand reports.

·      Report delivery customized to the needs of the end user - Reports created using PerformancePoint Planning can be exported to SQL Server Reporting Services or Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server or to a Dashboard so the user reporting experience can be customized to users who may not need the flexibility and options of ad-hoc reporting through the PerformancePoint native interfaces.

·      Build, modify, and maintain without coding – Data does not need to go into a business rules black box built with an undocumented scripting language.  PerformancePoint Planning business logic is built with a graphical user interface that allows finance users to write rules with a rules wizard and move data with an associations wizard.  These capabilities significantly reduce ongoing consulting and maintenance costs.

·      Integrates with your Various Databases – Microsoft SQL Server offers best-of breed extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) data integration facilities in the form of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). SSIS will easily interface with other data sources running on your Oracle and SQL Server databases.

PerformancePoint Software Costs

PerformancePoint Server software is priced at $20,000 per server and $195 per user and will leverage your existing Microsoft investments in SQL Server.  The Microsoft PerformancePoint solution is superior to any other solution in the market because of the depth and breadth of capability provided for the amount of investment required.  This solution will enable your Financial Reporting and Business     Intelligence initiatives with a single software platform that has the functionality, consistency and reliability you require.  It leverages your existing investments in the Microsoft platform and support skills you already posses.  The software investment is lower than other solutions because Microsoft’s vision is to provide business insight to innovate and improve performance to everyone that can benefit from it.

Please contact us to learn more about PerformancePoint software.