Harvey Jones Systems today announced it has secured the exclusive distribution rights for the Acorn suite of products in the South African marketplace.
Acorn Systems is the market leader in producing detailed profitability, costing and performance management metrics on an enterprise-wide basis.
Acorn has a blue chip client base in financial services, retail, CPG, manufacturing and distribution, including such industry leaders as Charles Schwab, Coca-Cola, AIG, AON, Citigroup, Fischer Scientific and many more.
The solutions are designed to take activity-based costing and profit analytics to the next level to allow customers to better understand the cost drivers and profit levers in their business, in order to increase profitability. The results speak for themselves. One financial service client added $9 billion in shareholder value by driving $600 million in annual costs savings from the insight Acorn provided.
Chris Fraga, Chief Strategy Officer for Acorn, says: "We are excited to have Harvey Jones Systems as our exclusive distributor in southern Africa. Their track record and knowledge of the market, performance management solutions, and domain expertise in high-profit-impact, technology-driven solutions will certainly give us a solid platform from which to launch our products and solutions in the region. The South African market is an important market for us to enter and partnering with HJS allows us to increase the global footprint of Acorn."
"We see Acorn as a perfect fit with our current solution set," says Keith Jones, Managing Director of Harvey Jones Systems.
"Their alliance with Microsoft and ProClairty will allow our existing customers to drive further value from their solutions. Their alliances with the other technology vendors will enable us to work with and support a larger community going forward.
"We see the Acorn type of solution as the most logical step in a business intelligence deployment. The quality of decisions made is directly related to the quality of the data delivered. If the business is given a holistic `true` version of where the profits are coming from and what is driving their costs then they can make highly effective decisions that drive real value in to the business. The ROI of this kind of deployment is enormous."
Acorn is unique for a number of different reasons. Acorn incorporates a `next-generation` product and methodology designed to leverage the capabilities and scalability offered by the new technology platforms. The solution can deliver its results in a format that is easily interpretable by the business intelligence tools on the market.
The calculation and simulation engine ensures profitability and costing metrics can be derived in a fraction of time of competitive products, and further, they can be sustained at a fraction of the cost and effort of previous generation systems.
The expensive and draining time and motion studies of the past, or survey-based approaches to resource consumption, ensured that doing any kind of costing analysis was both highly subjective and costly, meaning that if it was done it was done at a departmental level and it was a once-off exercise. Acorn allows this type of solution to be deployed quickly and automated to deliver a live system for continuous improvement.
The architecture means it can go to the lowest level of detail, meaning detailed cost, revenue, profit and capacity/utilisation of resources analysis, enabling insight into customer profitability, product and brand profitability and SKU rationalisation. Providing these metrics at the lowest level of granularity for the entire business also ensures any number of scenarios and result sets can be quickly derived and compared giving better insight in how to optimise the business and drive up shareholder value.
While Acorn is designed to leverage the full power of Microsoft SQL server 2005, its strong partnerships with the main technology vendors bear testimony to its unique positioning in the market. Acorn is a Gold Certified Microsoft product, has a formal strategic alliance with ProClarity and Cognos, and is SAP Netweaver certified.
Dr Robert Kaplan, founder of Activity Based Costing, is a board member, adding a further endorsement to the methodologies and approaches Acorn supports.
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Acorn Systems provides continuous enterprise-wide visibility into business performance, enabling profit improvement at a low total cost of ownership. Acorn Systems delivers a solution that is verifiably accurate, auditable and actionable. Acorn Systems` solution is flexible and dynamic and provides a sustainable, scalable platform for corporate performance management. Acorn Systems` clients come from many industries in the Global2000 including financial services, retail, consumer product goods, distribution and logistics, and manufacturing.