Epicor Enterprise Performance Management
The pace of business continues to accelerate. To keep up, your organization must move rapidly with precision and agility, reducing reaction time and optimizing performance. You can’t afford to miss an opportunity or delay a necessary course adjustment. Today’s information workers what decision support in real-time, and they want it deployed in the tools they already use, day in and day out. Epicor Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is an end-to-end solution that removes the barriers to better business insight through a combination of intuitive user experiences, user driven key performance indicators (KPI), and pre-packaged analytics that have real meaning to the business. Epicor EPM leverages the advanced analytic capabilities of the Microsoft platform and incorporates modern Web 2.0 concepts for unprecedented ease of use and ultimately business results.
Trackers and Dashboards
Built directly into all Epicor applications, Epicor Dashboards permit the combination of multiple different capabilities such as inquiries, ad-hoc reports, workbenches, graphical analyses, tactical business intelligence, alerts and business monitoring – all in a single dashboard. They provide a robust one-stop interface that replaces traditional menu systems with personalized role- or context based views and links into core transactions of the system. In addition, they put the visual indicators and functions you use the most right at your fingertips. Tooled with unique flexibility, Dashboards enables users to develop their own workbenches using a series of online views of information such as a tracker. From a tracker, “open with” technology is deployed to drill into any part of the system, whether it is to enter a new order, modify an existing one, or update a customer record.
The power of Epicor Dashboards is in how they enable users to specify how they work and tailor their workspace to fit their needs. The power of the Dashboard is in its ability to act much like the instrument cluster of your car. The Dashboard is used to provide real-time exception-driven indicator flags which alert you to possible problems in your business. From these business activity indicators, you will be able to easily drill down to appropriate parts of the system to see more information. Through integration with the Internet, Dashboards can merge Epicor application and external data as one to help drive your daily activities. From monitoring your employee intranet site to live access to industry-related Web sites, each Dashboard contains the information you and your employees need to more proactively run your business.
Management Reporter
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Management Reporter is an advanced financial reporting application designed to enable information workers to take control of their business by analyzing feature rich and intuitive reports. Offered in conjunction with Epicor Financial Management, it delivers a purpose-built environment for financial and accounting personnel to create, maintain, deploy and view boardroom quality financial statements. Users can easily monitor the health of the business and quickly understand what’s happening at any point in time.
Management reporting plays a key role in performance management. Displaying business results, performing variance analysis, comparing projections and consolidating data from disparate general ledgers provides business users with the business insight they need to make timely and relevant decisions. Accurate and auditable reporting is also essential to regulatory compliance.
Management Reporter is a part of Microsoft PerformancePoint Server, which is built on the powerful Microsoft SQL Server® platform, and helps you to provide accurate reporting in real time, from a centrally managed source. With Management Reporter, financial data can be combined from multiple financial models or general ledger companies and consolidated into a single report, giving your business users financial visibility into disperse operations.
Budget, Planning and Forecasting
For those companies that need advanced analytics such as budgeting and planning or advanced forecasting, Epicor offers Microsoft PerformancePoint Server. This platform is particularly flexible, scalable and can easily handle very large implementations across multiple installations, as well as managing mixed content from multiple sources.
Many organizations needs to have more control over their budget process or want to be able to test various business scenarios before they are actually deployed internally. At the same time they also want to have an easy and flexible environment that most people are familiar with to reduce education and environments that needs extra support. Microsoft Performance Point Server uses Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server to create a very powerful platform for advanced and collaborative Budget Planning and Forecasting, even for very large organizations.
Performance Point Server
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint™ Server is a comprehensive performance management solution that allows organizations to formulate strategy, drive execution and more effectively monitor performance through integrated monitoring, analytics, and planning capabilities. It provides all of the functionality that is needed for performance management including scorecards, dashboards, management reporting, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. The application reaches all employees, across all business functions (finance, operations, marketing, sales, and human resources).
Operational Data Store and Data Warehousing
Your Epicor next-generation enterprise applications offer far reaching business functionality that spans literally hundreds of business processes, backed by an ever growing transactional database of information. Business performance is based not just on how these applications help run day to day processes but by how they support greater business insight – from historical reporting to advanced analysis. At the same time, although your Epicor applications are optimized for transaction processing, ad-hoc inquiries and scheduling, a more advanced solution is required for when reporting and inquiry volumes increase and for longer term performance analysis.
Epicor Replication Server
Epicor Replication efficiently replicates all database transactions from one or more production companies and application server to a single or multiple separate ODS environments. Replication Server is designed to offload processing from the main application server in support of enterprise performance management requirements and supports offline reporting, offline access to archived as well as live data, offline ad hoc queries (including those from Epicor Portal/Information Worker), offload of external system processing (Mobile Connect, Sales Connect, etc), cloud based services, aggregated database holding records from multiple companies across multiple servers, and data transfer for additional business intelligence. Through Replication Server, your business holds the keys to a massively scalable environment that grows as your business does through effective load balancing of essential business processes.
Epicor Cube Connect
Epicor databases often store millions of business transactions. This huge amount of business data can provide valuable insights into your business and give you information that is immediately actionable – if you know how to get to it.
OLAP is the preferred way of extracting meaningful information from large datasets, because it provides intuitive analysis and makes it easier to find trends, patterns, ratios, and quantities in transactional data. OLAP is built on multidimensional data structures called cubes, which traditionally need to be custom designed for each set of transaction data. In addition, designing a cube is not a trivial task: it requires considerable knowledge of the structure of the source database. Once the cube has been created, there is no easy way to deploy it to other Epicor installations.
