PerformancePoint Server 2007

Top 10 Benefits
The top 10 benefits of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you transform your business process and turn your data into a competitive advantage.

A complete and integrated performance management solution

Many performance management applications require connectors, interfaces, and add-ins to link their various applications and to the Microsoft Office environment. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is natively integrated across all aspects of the solution—from reporting and analysis, to planning and budgeting, to dashboarding and forecasting.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 is designed to improve operational and financial performance across all departments and all levels of your organization. You can use this single integrated application to monitor and analyze the success your company enjoys or the barriers it faces and to plan for the future of your business.
Performance management for all business users

While many solutions on the market focus on business analysts and BI experts, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is designed to reach everyone involved in your business at all levels of your organization. PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides a user experience in the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office system, including Microsoft Office Excel, Office Outlook, and Office SharePoint Server.

And through the scalability and high performance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, your organization can afford to deliver the right information that helps the broadest number of people make better, faster, and more relevant decisions without continually burdening the IT department.
Monitoring, analyzing, and planning across the entire organization

Because of high cost, high complexity, and the need for significant IT support, most performance management environments limit their access to just a few executives or analysts. Because Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 resides within the Microsoft applications that you use today, it’s now economically feasible for all executives, managers, and front-line employees to have the same access to valuable insight from a high-quality performance management application.

Everyone can access the metrics, key performance indicators, dashboards, and reports to see how they contribute to the performance of the organization and to the overall corporate strategy—all leading to improved corporate performance.
Advanced analytic and visualization capabilities

Analysis is a core component of the performance management cycle. An organization is at a competitive advantage if every decision maker in it can quickly and easily perform analysis that helps them make better decisions and execute better against corporate goals and objectives.

Using the capabilities incorporated into Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, people can benefit from a single business data model shared across monitoring, analytics, and planning activities. PerformancePoint Server 2007 guides information workers so they can easily monitor what is happening and make better sense of what the data analysis is telling them. The advanced visualization capabilities can help you spot trends and opportunities easily, allowing for better planning for your business.
Aligned and integrated corporate planning

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 contains robust planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities that allow for accelerated cycles to help the organization better align critical resources. Planning and budget analysts are able to centrally manage the planning process. They can easily build models that contain the key business rules, assumptions, calculations, and other business drivers that enable more people across your organization to participate in the planning process.

These models form the basis for the budget which is then accessed in Microsoft Office Excel, allowing individuals to enter data based on their unique knowledge of the business. These models ensure consistently applied business rules and assumptions that align to overall corporate goals—all in a flexible tool that everyone knows and understands how to use without big investments in training.
Shorter budgeting cycles and broader contribution

One of the big complaints in many organizations is the length of the budgeting process. From waiting weeks to get the initial cut of the numbers to the time spent waiting for approvals and input from other departments, the process is never a fun one. To address these issues, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides powerful workflow and collaboration functionality that can streamline planning, budgeting, and forecasting cycle times.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 enables business users to configure rules that help them assign tasks, manage budget creation, and monitor submissions and approvals. You can reduce your budgeting cycle from months to weeks. At the same time, you get the insight you need to align company resources—all in the familiar Microsoft Office environment.
Accountability from the individual to the enterprise

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 uses a model-driven approach. Users can create scorecards, dashboards, analytics, and plans that align with their own responsibilities and goals and with the overall goals and objectives of the organization. Providing maximum flexibility, the system accommodates unique departmental business models that synchronize with those above and below them in the organization, as well as across departments and up to the corporate level. So everyone has an up-to-date, consistent view of the data and the most current insight on the entire organization’s performance.
Cross-enterprise view

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides a complete perspective of business performance across enterprise functions such as finance, operations, sales, and human resources. PerformancePoint Server 2007 uses SQL Server 2005 to integrate information across disparate enterprise systems and business functions, providing all users with a more strategic and forward-looking view of the business.

A unique capability of PerformancePoint Server 2007 is model-to-model mapping, which allows you to map data from one model, business unit, or plan into the model of another. For instance, the resources allocated to personnel in a business unit can be mapped into the business model for the finance department and into the human resource department’s planning model. People can only see the information they have permission to view, but no matter where the data resides, everyone automatically has the timeliest information and can avoid errors introduced manually.

Business rules can also be embedded with the data model, which means that a business unit can’t go outside a specific set of boundaries when trying to allocate resources, for example, to new headcount. PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides the critical and unique functionality that will help ensure that everyone has the flexibility they need to run their part of the business while staying aligned with broader business goals.
Enhanced partnership between IT and business analysts

While IT provides the infrastructure and security for crucial business applications, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 business modeling tools enable business analysts to use their insight to manage roles, workflows, business rules, and information without having to continually rely on IT input. This increases the pace at which business models can be developed, deployed, and modified to meet changing business conditions.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 also features a user-friendly design and application wizard that business people can use to build their own dashboards and scorecards and create interactive analytics charts and graphs without the need for IT support.
Built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform

Using the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you build an enterprise-grade, scalable performance management application. PerformancePoint Server 2007 uses Microsoft Office as its primary interface, so business users can interact with familiar tools like Excel to consume information, collaborate with colleagues, and contribute to plans and the performance management cycle.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 also uses the proven data engine of SQL Server 2005 for data integration; an analytical data model that includes a calculation engine and data mining; and a highly flexible and scalable reporting platform to broadcast information to a wide audience. All of this is delivered via the Web in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, providing everyone with a central place to get their business intelligence information.