Features and Functionality

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 delivers a broad set of features and functionality to support the diverse performance management needs of today’s fast-paced business environment, including data monitoring, analysis of key performance indicators, and planning and forecasting throughout the enterprise. Here is a look at the key product benefits:
Key Objective Key Activity Key Capability
Design models that align with the way you think about your business.
  • Aligned planning, budgeting and forecasting: Provide models that allow planning, budgeting and forecasting that is aligned throughout your organization.
  • Design models at the corporate, divisional, and operational levels.
  • Load data from multiple structured and unstructured sources to provide a 360-degree view of enterprise data.
  • Link models together to share business definitions, rules, and plans and provide cross-functional alignment up, down, and across the organization.
  • Model an organization using multiple dimensions, hierarchies, members, and properties using wizards and the modeling application.
  • Perform validation and error handling and apply business logic when loading data from disparate systems into PerformancePoint Server 2007.
Top-down and bottom-up planning helps connect people and drive accountability.
  • Flexible resource planning and allocation: Help your organization gain visibility into resource availability and allocations.
  • Driver-based planning: Provide business analysts the flexibility to run multiple scenarios and models without impacting approved plans.
  • Support for rolling forecasts: Your organization can automate the process, and have a better understanding of, your forecasts.
  • What-if planning: Conduct sensitivity and what-if analyses and simulations to assess the impact of the changes to business drivers. Impacts can be easily traced.
  • Plan, budget, and forecast at corporate, divisional, and operational levels.
  • Capture and model key business drivers, and base plans, budgets, and forecasts on these key drivers
  • Data loaded from structured and unstructured sources can be used to drive plans
  • Create rolling forecasts based on historical data and anticipated business conditions.
  • Conduct what-if modeling and create alternative planning scenarios.
Process management provides you with a way to manage business rules, forms, submissions, and approvals while involving more individuals into the planning process.
  • Central storage of business logic: Manage regular business processes in one application and support these processes across the entire organization
  • Manage end-user data entry and reporting through familiar Microsoft Excel and ensure broad user participation.
  • Define business process schedules, owners and distribute data forms automatically.
  • Monitor and act on the status of the submission processes as part of the summarization and consolidation process.
  • Define custom and standard tasks that do not require user interaction as part of a process schedule.
  • Apply business rules to profitability and cash flow planning, including advanced allocation calculations and financial consolidation rules.
Management and statutory reporting are supported with currency conversion, intercompany eliminations and multi-tier allocations.
  • Profitability and cash flow reporting: Provides the visibility finance departments need across multiple systems to gain consistency to reconcile analyses faster and optimize their cash situation.
  • Cost allocation: Allocate true costs to different groups through centralized business rules.
  • Automation of management and financial reporting: Reduce the report creation time while maintaining the authenticity of the source information.
  • Apply business rules to profitability and cash flow planning, including advanced allocation calculations and financial consolidation rules.
  • Support multiple currency translations, financial consolidation of partial ownerships, and management consolidation.
  • Support data level annotations and consolidation history, and audit for review and analysis.
  • Use the report wizard to create management reports and financial statements.
  • Combine operational and financial data into single reports.
  • Support Excel-based reporting for complex and parameterized reports.
  • Publish formatted reports to a SharePoint portal where you can schedule delivery of information to a broad audience.
Monitor key business drivers and drive alignment: spans from personal performance dashboards to formal methodology-based and cascading scorecards
  • Provide visibility of corporate strategy and goals to all users.
  • Deliver a more comprehensive view of performance from across structured and unstructured data sources throughout the business.
  • Reflect changes in plan, budget and forecast data in real time.
  • Align business activity by driving strategy and visibility across divisions and operations.
  • Make scorecards a part of all activities to enable informed decision making in line with business drivers.
  • Create interactive and cascaded scorecards and dashboards with an ability to drilldown into details. (KPI’s in a hierarchy roll up their values to show summary status).
  • Support scorecards from variety of data sources (SharePoint, Excel, SQL SSAS, Excel Services and relational databases).
  • Enable multiple targeting -plan, budget, forecast as well as customized targets.
  • Support structured as well as unstructured information tied to the scorecards and dashboards.
Provide rich visual context
  • Create interactive strategy maps linked to KPI data and which display KPI status.
  • Provide users with rich dashboard filters to dynamically filter all report views displayed on the dashboard.
  • Link individual KPIs to analytic charts and grids to analyze root causes and find driving factors.
  • Create parameterized dashboards. Views and reports can be linked to the scorecard, parameters can be passed to the scorecard, and views update with the scorecard.
  • Create interactive strategy maps linked to KPI data and support clicking through strategy maps to additional reports.
  • Create Web-based dynamic and interactive analytical charts and grids with capabilities like drill-to-detail, drill up/down, cross-drill, expand/collapse, and link these to the scorecards and dashboards.
  • Sort, filter and rank on scorecard columns from the Web user interface (Internet Explorer).
Drive accountability and collaboration: Assign owners to key business metrics to drive accountability throughout the organization.
  • Assign owners for KPIs at various levels and across divisions and operations.
  • Allows users to collaborate with each other through adding comments to KPIs on dashboards.
  • Assign and display owners to KPIs on scorecards.
  • Store comments on a per-scorecard, per-cell, per-page filter basis from the Web user interface (Internet Explorer).
  • Export scorecards, analytical grids and charts, and strategy maps to PowerPoint 2007, Excel 2007 and SQL Server Reporting Services.
Ease of creation and fast time to deployment.
  • Familiar Microsoft Office 2007 look and feel.
  • Fast time to delivery and ease of administration
  • Designed for collaboration and reuse.
  • Off-line authoring capabilities: Scorecards and dashboards can be defined in the client while being disconnected from the server.
  • Design and deploy dashboards using pre-built layout templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
  • Business users can create and centrally manage business logic using a wizard-driven interface with no coding and IT support.
Web-based analysis provides users with rich analytical functionality out of the box, minimizing help required from IT staff
  • Embed and integrate analytical views in any Web-based application.
  • Navigate data easily through multidimensional slice and dice, drill-across, drill-to-detail, root-cause analysis, and centralized business-logic definitions.
  • Enable guided and contextual analysis through tight integration of KPIs and analytics in the dashboard.
  • Data navigation capabilities include multidimensional slice and dice, drill down/up, cross-drill, data sort and filter, expand/collapse, show/hide, root cause analysis, and Web client for ad-hoc query and analysis.
  • Analytical grids and charts support AJAX technology to provide rich user experience on the Web.
  • Analytical views can be embedded and integrated in any Web-based application.
Predictive analytics to see trends and forecast key metrics.
  • Leverage powerful data-mining capabilities from SQL Server 2005 to forecast metrics and spot trends.
  • Support predictive analytics of scorecard data and generate predictions for the KPIs on the scorecards.
  • Select number of periods and other forecasting parameters from within the dashboard.
Advanced data visualizations make it easy for users to understand complex information faster and discover highlights, trends and opportunities.
  • Render data visually with decomposition tree, performance map, and perspective views.
  • Advanced visualization views include decomposition tree, performance map, and perspective view.
  • Decomposition tree allows quick view of the drivers of performance up/down and across the organization.
  • Performance map combines elements of space, size, and color to provide a cohesive map of the business.
  • Perspective views allow users to quickly analyze large amounts of data and show the relationship between two measures.