SPF Plus Road Map
Financial Consolidation Applications at the Plateau of Productivity
BPM, BI, CPM, DW, KPI's, OLAP, SarBox and Friends
Business Performance Management - Finding Order in what would otherwise be Chaos
Best Practice - Technology & Practice save costs
Transforming Retail Transactions into Business Intelligence

SPF Plus Road MAP

SPF continues to evolve the SPF Plus BPM application for TM1 on 3 key fronts:

SPF Plus Version 9.2.x

Development on our current COM+ product continues with releases slated for Q1 '07. Some planned new features will include:

· Freeze panes in the web (Now available v10)

· Release of advanced web printing through IE7 (Now available v10)

· Major overhaul of the user interface. New look & feel to be consistent with new .Net 2.0 and IE 7 interface (Now available v10)

· Zoom capability including controls through IE7 (Now available v10)

· Ongoing support for all versions of TM1 incorporating TM1 API changes from TM1 9.0 SP2 (Now available v10)

Breaking new ground with SPF Plus for Existing Customers

In its current form and having been in stable release for over 5 years, the application of SPF Plus' inherent capabilities with our clients continues to expand. Most recently that has seen:

· the development of .Net dashboards incorporating TM1 data with rich and flexible visual components including dials and gauges

· complex input pages including unlimited text entry, data validation and calendar controls both through Excel and delivered via the web

· embedding SPF Web pages directly into client intranet and extranets in context navigation

· triggering TI Processes through the web allowing for one click maintenance from anywhere

· task Workflow

· Alerting

· URL addressable Web reports and Cube Views

SPF Plus Version 10 [Calumo in .Net 2.0]

Several years ago SPF identified that .Net would become the industry standard software development platform for open systems delivered through Microsoft's Operating Systems. In parallel with our COM+ development, we have also been developing using .Net 2.0 (also supporting .Net 3.0 + Vista). Because of the groundbreaking nature of this development, we intend to rebrand SPF Plus as Calumo. Calumo uses the latest Microsoft .Net technologies such as the new “Remoting” service which improves client to server performance by up to 15 times and the latest MS ASP.Net Ajax libraries to enrich the user experience by removing the need for constant post backs. The latest version of .Net offers enhanced performance, scalability, stability and an abundance of new features.

In order to connect to TM1 and provide our .Net 2.0 rich application layer to our SPFPlus clients, we are awaiting the release of ADOMD.net V9 compliant drivers for TM1. We are hoping these will be in place for Q1 '07. We have however been able to release Calumo for Microsoft's Analysis Services in June 2006 which has been well received.

We have applied significant resources to re-compiling SPF Plus on .Net 2.0 and adding further functionality in the process. We are looking forward to releasing Calumo for TM1.

Financial Consolidation Applications at the Plateau of Productivity

We read with great interest recently that Financial Consolidation Applications have reached the Plateau of Productivity on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence & Corporate Performance Management.

The Gartner Hype Cycle (see fig below) tries to make sense of different emerging technologies starting on the left hand side of the graph and typically travelling from left to right. Following their introduction, technologies can be subject to unrealistic hype bringing them to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” only to fall into the “Trough of Disillusionment” once reality sets in, before emerging at the right hand side where they finally begin to deliver some of the benefits that were originally promised at the “Plateau of Productivity” (in many cases new technologies never progress far, due to failure along the way).

At SPF we provide a rich ecosystem of best-practice solutions based on our core product capabilities. Let’s look at the type of functionality commonly expected in Financial Consolidation Applications as they stand at the Plateau of Productivity.

Data collection
- Online over the internet (real-time for collaboration)
- Mapping (for sites with different ledgers)
- Validation (stop/proceed based on check-total, variance etc)
- Online review and approval process at each tier (Workflow)
- Escalations if late (alerting)
Journal entries
- Recurring and manual
- Automated currency translation gains/losses
- Automated P&L, Cash Flow, Balance Sheet & notes
- Intercompany processing
- Automated balancing
- Audit trail
Intercompany eliminations
- Define intercompany accounts
- Automated eliminations
- In balance / out-of-balance reporting
Foreign currency translation
- Multiple rate types
- Define which rate type by account (supports temporal method)
Consolidation (obviously)
- Consolidate actuals and budgets
- Consolidate statistical measures such as headcounts
- Accommodate different fiscal periods & calendars
- Wholly owned or minority interest
- Multi-tier consolidation or hierarchies
- Revaluations
- Automated Intercompany eliminations to first common parent
- Flexible Chart of Accounts
Financial reporting
- Results in home or reporting currency
- Multiple hierarchical reporting
- Lead schedules for supporting notes
- Rounding to thousands
- Allocation of rounding error to specified account

At SPF we offer a unified architecture for all our modules ranging from Financial Consolidation to BI, Planning and Operational performance management applications. All these are available through a familiar interface (Excel or Internet Explorer) offering the lowest total cost of ownership amongst BPM vendors today.

BPM, BI, CPM, DW, KPI's, OLAP, SarBox and Friends

Some terms go out of fashion as the technology becomes mainstream (eg OLAP), only to be replaced by new terms that better describe new capability expected and hopefully being delivered. One such term is BPM (Business Performance Management) which I believe has recently been superseded by Performance Management 2.0. Gartner's definition of these terms will be subtly different from IDC's and finance sees things differently from IT. There is much room for overlap and ambiguity.

For many years we used the words "Planning, Analysis, Reporting" as our company tag line to best describe what we did. Today we use "Business Intelligent" as our tag line, which is more esoteric and we hope more thought provoking as well. Here is what we think about and what best describes what we do now:

Performance Management Applications

Business Intelligence
- Reporting
- Analysis
Planning
- Budgeting
- Forecasting
- Modelling
Dashboards

Scorecards
Metrics

Financial Consolidation
Monitoring

Workflow
Notification

Vertical Applications
- Retail, Telco, Banking, Construction
- Consumer Goods, Freight and Transport
- Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Industrial
- Professional Services, Resources Utilities.
Horizontal Applications
- Executive Management
- Finance
- IT
- Sales
- Marketing
- Human Resources
- Production & Logistics
OLAP
ETL

Business Performance Management – Finding Order in what would otherwise be Chaos

We are often asked to explain what BPM is and why it is so important compared to a non-integrated, non-unified approach to business intelligence, reporting, analytics, planning etc.

It struck me on seeing the image of the flock of birds below, that one way to answer this was to use pictures. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words.

The point of all the images that we’ve chosen is that patterns and meanings can be found and relationships and collaborations possible within the whole.

Nature, fractals, tessellations and origami are all fine illustrations of order out of apparent chaos. And so to with BPM, an organisation can gain greater insights through the observation of structures, relationships and patterns of the whole enterprise.

Fig 1: During spring in Denmark, flocks of more than a million European starlings gather in incredible formations such as shown above.

Fig 2: Origami tessellations take a simple crease pattern unit and repeat this across the paper. Example above by Alex Bateman (can you visualize the spiral pattern?).

Fig 3: Horocycle 4 - Knots and dynamics - A collaboration between Jos Leys and Prof. Etienne Ghys (hmm, reminds me of fishing with my dad).

Best Practice - Technology & Practice save costs

In his book "Best Practices in Planning and Management Reporting: From Data to Decisions", David Axson contends that a best practice must meet six criteria:

It must effect a measurable change in performance.
It needs to be applicable to a broad spectrum of organizations.
It should be proven in practice.
It needs to exploit proven technologies.
It must ensure an acceptable level of control and risk management.
It has to match the skills and capabilities of the companies in which it is used.

Axson predicts that companys who adopt best practice can reduce the cost of the finance function: Axson writes, "It is not unreasonable to project that as full adoption of established and emerging best practices increases, the overall average cost of finance could fall a further 50 percent by 2010."

Transforming Retail Transactions into Business Intelligence

For Retailers, the ever increasing diversity and fragmentation of consumer demographics requires that they analyse customer data at a very detailed, granular-level. They need rigorous timely processes to respond to demand signals and segment customers in a way that's superior to their competition.

By properly aggregating and analyzing retail transactions, that would otherwise offer little insight into the business, data can be transformed into actionable information that can increase sales and profitability, provide competitive advantage and deepen customer and vendor loyalty.