Walker and Oracle have announced the Performance Management Suite, an integrated offering from Walker that embeds Oracle Express and Oracle Financial Analyzer with Walker Financial Consolidation software to help customers manage company performance.
The suite leverages the Oracle Express OLAP server as a single data source to enable business analysis for budgeting, financial consolidation and financial reporting. The new suite addresses the challenge of consolidating enterprise resource planning (ERP) data to empower analytic applications, a market expected to grow to $2,6bn by 2001.
"With most enterprise-class companies, budgeting, planning, forecasting and financial consolidation and analysis are substantial challenges," says Dan Sholler, program director, Application Delivery Strategies, META Group. "The tight integration of an OLAP server such as Oracle Express, with financial analytic applications such as Oracle`s Financial Analyzer, with Walker`s financial consolidation module, resolves these issues."
Integrated analytic applications suite
Modules in the Performance Management Suite include:
- Financial Analyzer: Oracle Financial Analyzer delivers financial reporting, analysis, budgeting and planning, allowing organizations to control costs, analyse performance, evaluate opportunities and perform "what-if" scenarios.
- Financial Consolidation: Walker Horizon Financial Consolidation manages the collection, adjustment and reporting of consolidated results for statutory, management and tax reporting across the enterprise.
- Oracle Express: Oracle Express 6.2 lets users analyze data in a structured or ad hoc form using a multidimensional data model that includes support for "what-if" scenarios, forecasting and financial modeling.
In addition to its "what-if" capabilities, the Performance Management Suite delivers views of traditional and industry-specific key performance indicators (KPIs). These include earnings per share or return on equity, while industry-specific indicators include downtime per hour (manufacturing), net interest spread (financial services) or cents per kilowatt hour (utilities).
The use of one OLAP data server ensures several benefits:
- Simplified installation and maintenance
- Streamlined process for comparing actuals to plan
- Views of any number of dimensions (company, budget centre, account, time, product, activity)
- Ability to handle large volumes of data
- Data integrity
The Walker Horizon series of products is distributed in South Africa by the IBD Group, a Global Technology subsidiary.
Share
Editorial contacts