Microsoft Gold Certified partner, IS Partners, has welcomed the introduction of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a performance management (PM) application that will extend business intelligence capabilities to all individuals within an organisation for improved overall company performance.
IS Partners is one of a select number of partners worldwide and the only partner in Africa to participate in the PerformancePoint Server Technical Adoption Programme (TAP). The programme centres on a core group of customers and partners who are involved in early adoption and evaluation of Microsoft`s pre-release applications.
PerformancePoint Server will enable businesses to improve their performance and changes the BI stakes dramatically. Pierre Naude, Financial BI Product Manager at IS Partners, explains that companies have spent many years automating key operational processes by implementing ERP solutions. Finance, however, has remained trapped in a manual process of capturing and extracting key information from Excel.
"While PerformancePoint Server gives finance managers access to BI capabilities to better manage their forecasting, budgeting, consolidation, financial reporting and scorecard functions, it also opens the door for everyone in the organisation to participate in key financial processes, contribute to organisational strategy and be accountable. As such, it is designed to improve business," he says.
The application will drive greater buy-in to company performance, as budgets can be better aligned to organisational parameters and strategy through widespread involvement, from division or branch managers, for example.
"By involving all employees, accurate, timely information can be contributed or extracted for flexible forecasting, which can now be done at regular monthly, weekly or even daily intervals, rather than the typical scenario where executive management do forecasts and budgets with figures fixed for the year."
PerformancePoint will further allow the performance management cycle time to be compressed to better align with changing customer and market dynamics. "By understanding trends in your business you can model and report on various forecast scenarios and anticipate `what might happen next`," says Naude.
The ability to centrally manage financial information and spreadsheets ensures control over financial data integrity and makes scorecarding, analytics and planning easier to manage and less time-consuming. Financial and operational performance can also be improved across all areas of the business, including marketing, sales and HR, for example.
"Enterprise and mid-market environments will save on the costs typically associated with performance management solutions as PerformancePoint Server can be easily deployed on the existing Microsoft platform. As the application makes use of familiar Microsoft Office tools, user training and IT support requirements are greatly reduced," Naude adds.
Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) also forms an integral part of the solution to bring added flexibility to how users generate, view and manage performance metrics across the organisation.
"IS Partners has gained extensive experience in all aspects of Microsoft BI, including SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft BSM, and brings its financial BI experience to PerformancePoint Server implementations and customisations," he says.
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