Business Performance Management and Financial Analytic Applications

Business performance management and financial analytic applications consist of cross-industry and cross-functional applications whose main purpose is to measure, analyze, and optimize business performance and financial analytic processes. There are two major areas covered. The first is business performance management applications such as budgeting and planning, consolidation, and balanced scorecard applications that measure and analyze business performance according to KPIs. The integration of information and processes across these three areas collectively supports the management of business performance. The second is financial analytic applications support–extended financial management such as forecasting, activity-based costing/management, profitability applications and packaged financial analytics delivered with a data model, and standard reporting based on an analytical platform that supports the financial analysis needs of the business.

Balanced scorecard applications incorporate domain expertise across a range of business processes/subjects/functions, such as accounting, human resources, operations, and CRM.

BPM and financial analytic software products must also meet the criteria for classification as an analytic application (see the Other Market Views section). These criteria are:

• Business process support. This condition relates to packaged applications software that structures and automates a group of tasks pertaining to the review development of new business (i.e., opportunity).

• Separation of function. This condition means that the application can function independently of an organization's core transactional applications. (It can be dependent on such applications for data and might send results back to these applications.)

• Time-oriented, integrated data from multiple sources. The application extracts, transforms, and integrates data from multiple sources (internal or external to the business), supporting a time-based dimension for analysis of past and future trends, or it accesses such a database.

The following are representative vendors and products in this market:

• Cartesis Financial Control and Reporting
• Hyperion (such as Financial Management, Planning, and Customer Profitability)
• Longview Budgeting/Planning/Forecasting
• Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting
• PerformanceSoft (formerly Panorama Business Views [pbviews])
• SAP (SEM)
• SAS (Financial Intelligence and Performance Management)