The demand for accurate, timely information across disparate systems in an enterprise has been answered by vendors touting some or near total corporate performance management (CPM) capabilities. Yet, while there are plenty of vendors to choose from, there is no overall CPM market leader. Attempting to gain a competitive advantage in the crowded business intelligence (BI) and CPM market, some enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are resorting to prudent BI and enterprise process management (EPM) acquisitions.
Geac Goes the Acquisition Route
Geac Computers' 2003 acquisition of former financial analytics provider Comshare has resulted in Geac MPC. Geac MPC is a single, integrated CPM offering that supports dynamic planning and analysis for CFOs, and improves visibility throughout the organization with the aim of a single version of the truth, and no surprises. Although Hyperion and Cognos are the undisputed leaders in financial planning and budgeting, with Oracle (including the former PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management product) and SAP also having a sizeable market share, Geac, is still worth mentioning. While not a market leader per se, it is still notable because it has been reinventing itself within the realm of BI.
Part Five of the Business Intelligence Report Status Quo series.
Geac MPC is a centrally-maintained, Web-based application that provides the enterprise's strategy formulation, planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, and reporting and analysis functionality that users need to run their business efficiently and effectively. It is a unified, comprehensive solution that enables management to set strategic goals and translate them into action plans, track results, and take corrective action as needed—all based on a continuous flow of near real-time performance data. In other words, with the solution, organizations should be able to model business plans to develop effective strategies, link these strategies to budgets for better resource allocation, automate global financial consolidation to see accurate results faster, generate statistically accurate budgets and plans, and report and analyze data in the most meaningful ways. All this should reduce the time spent performing manual tasks, and free managers to spend more time analyzing results, evaluating alternatives, and implementing business decisions.
Although integration should be one of the cornerstones of CPM offerings, unfortunately, solutions offered by most vendors are not often integrated. Instead, the solutions are made up of multiple diverse (acquired) applications and administration tools that focus on making interfaces, audits, and reconciliations more efficient. This requires companies to have separate IT and finance department support for each of these applications, with the result being that both the financial and IT staff spend most of their time trying to ensure that each system has the same data, and that the users are accessing the correct, most recent data. Needless to say, these types of solutions could be unnecessarily expensive, may require multiple implementations, and are difficult to administer and maintain, and as a result, they struggle to promote collaboration and do not maximize return on investment (ROI).
To remedy this problem, Geac MPC stores business information on a single platform, using a single business model. Data is contributed only once, which eliminates the need to re-key or link data, copy and distribute templates, and guess which version of the data is correct, as is often the case with error-prone spreadsheet-based management systems. Enterprises should benefit from data integrity, one version of the truth creating confidence in the produced numbers and figures, and a clearer line of sight into operational performance. Furthermore, business professionals, with proper user security, can access data immediately via a Web browser, MS Excel, and a personal digital assistant (PDA), which all should in turn lead to improved productivity. When modifications to structures, business rules, calculations, or the application are necessary, they need to only be made once and are automatically reflected throughout the application. Geac MPC can do this all by leveraging the data stored in existing underlying transactional systems which will allow everyone across the enterprise to work with the same version of accurate, up-to-date information.
In May, Geac launched a major new release, Geac MPC 7, which should offer Global 2000 companies multiple beneefits, including improved enterprise-wide planning and alignment, streamlined reporting, and simplified compliance. The product, which has already been delivered to early adopter customers, will be generally available worldwide this summer, and should further advance how enterprise-wide strategic and operational business planning is done. Rather than just periodically updating a scorecard with operational results, Geac MPC 7 will help organizations transform and communicate their strategic plans into quantifiable objectives, tactics, and supporting activities with assigned ownership at the correct responsibility level throughout the enterprise. Consequently, the result will be a collaborative environment for planning, tracking, and predicting progress toward key management objectives.
Geac Goes the Acquisition Route
Geac Computers' 2003 acquisition of former financial analytics provider Comshare has resulted in Geac MPC. Geac MPC is a single, integrated CPM offering that supports dynamic planning and analysis for CFOs, and improves visibility throughout the organization with the aim of a single version of the truth, and no surprises. Although Hyperion and Cognos are the undisputed leaders in financial planning and budgeting, with Oracle (including the former PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management product) and SAP also having a sizeable market share, Geac, is still worth mentioning. While not a market leader per se, it is still notable because it has been reinventing itself within the realm of BI.
Part Five of the Business Intelligence Report Status Quo series.
Geac MPC is a centrally-maintained, Web-based application that provides the enterprise's strategy formulation, planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, and reporting and analysis functionality that users need to run their business efficiently and effectively. It is a unified, comprehensive solution that enables management to set strategic goals and translate them into action plans, track results, and take corrective action as needed—all based on a continuous flow of near real-time performance data. In other words, with the solution, organizations should be able to model business plans to develop effective strategies, link these strategies to budgets for better resource allocation, automate global financial consolidation to see accurate results faster, generate statistically accurate budgets and plans, and report and analyze data in the most meaningful ways. All this should reduce the time spent performing manual tasks, and free managers to spend more time analyzing results, evaluating alternatives, and implementing business decisions.
Although integration should be one of the cornerstones of CPM offerings, unfortunately, solutions offered by most vendors are not often integrated. Instead, the solutions are made up of multiple diverse (acquired) applications and administration tools that focus on making interfaces, audits, and reconciliations more efficient. This requires companies to have separate IT and finance department support for each of these applications, with the result being that both the financial and IT staff spend most of their time trying to ensure that each system has the same data, and that the users are accessing the correct, most recent data. Needless to say, these types of solutions could be unnecessarily expensive, may require multiple implementations, and are difficult to administer and maintain, and as a result, they struggle to promote collaboration and do not maximize return on investment (ROI).
To remedy this problem, Geac MPC stores business information on a single platform, using a single business model. Data is contributed only once, which eliminates the need to re-key or link data, copy and distribute templates, and guess which version of the data is correct, as is often the case with error-prone spreadsheet-based management systems. Enterprises should benefit from data integrity, one version of the truth creating confidence in the produced numbers and figures, and a clearer line of sight into operational performance. Furthermore, business professionals, with proper user security, can access data immediately via a Web browser, MS Excel, and a personal digital assistant (PDA), which all should in turn lead to improved productivity. When modifications to structures, business rules, calculations, or the application are necessary, they need to only be made once and are automatically reflected throughout the application. Geac MPC can do this all by leveraging the data stored in existing underlying transactional systems which will allow everyone across the enterprise to work with the same version of accurate, up-to-date information.
In May, Geac launched a major new release, Geac MPC 7, which should offer Global 2000 companies multiple beneefits, including improved enterprise-wide planning and alignment, streamlined reporting, and simplified compliance. The product, which has already been delivered to early adopter customers, will be generally available worldwide this summer, and should further advance how enterprise-wide strategic and operational business planning is done. Rather than just periodically updating a scorecard with operational results, Geac MPC 7 will help organizations transform and communicate their strategic plans into quantifiable objectives, tactics, and supporting activities with assigned ownership at the correct responsibility level throughout the enterprise. Consequently, the result will be a collaborative environment for planning, tracking, and predicting progress toward key management objectives.
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