Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application that enables you to monitor, analyze, and plan your business. By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, plans, and budgets, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help everyone across your organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives.
The infrastructure of PerformancePoint Server 2007 is built directly into the environment on your desktop today—Microsoft Office. Your people will not have to learn new software. They can use applications they already know, like Microsoft Office Excel and Office SharePoint Server.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 is built on top of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, a proven platform for business intelligence, data integration, and reporting. SQL Server 2005 offers you a highly secure performance management environment and scales to support as many users as you want to include in the performance management process.
Understanding what is happening at any given point in time within your organization is critical to effective performance management. You need to be able to:
Check progress against team and corporate goals. Learn how a division, subsidiary, or team is performing against corporate targets. See how individual goals affect overall company strategy.
You can use Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to build highly visual and interactive scorecards and dashboards that can keep you up to date on what is happening and how it relates to the overall performance of your organization.
But the application’s functionality goes beyond simple monitoring and enables you to seamlessly move to analyzing and understanding why things are happening. You can zero in on off-target key performance indicators (KPIs) and quickly take steps to bring about change.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides you with two ways to display critical information: scorecards and dashboards. Here’s a look at each in a little more detail.
Scorecards
A scorecard is a visual representation of your company’s strategy. PerformancePoint Server 2007 helps make it easy to take critical metrics and build scorecards that map to your strategic goals throughout the organization. Scorecards offer a rich, visual gauge that everyone in your organization can reference to see:
The performance of specific initiatives, business units, or the company as a whole. Individual goals in the context of larger corporate strategy.
Certified by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, PerformancePoint Server 2007 supports building scorecards that are based on a well-defined business process methodology or on your organization’s strategic framework.
Dashboards
A dashboard is a collection of graphs, reports, and KPIs that can help you monitor such things as progress on a specific initiative, the effectiveness of operations, and progress against sales forecasts. You can build a dashboard that supports a wide variety of users, from individuals to the company as a whole. Dashboards can contain information from scorecards (or subsets of scorecards), as well as graphs and charts, strategy maps, and unstructured information such as Microsoft Office Word documents.
When built correctly, dashboards can give you quick insight into company performance. With PerformancePoint Server 2007, you can design and deploy a range of dashboards—from those that contain a simple group of reports to those that contain multi-select filters, annotations, highly interactive analytic charts, and cascading scorecards.
Dashboards built with PerformancePoint Server 2007 are highly interactive and are deployed in a zero-footprint, no-download Web environment. You can deploy scorecards and dashboards built by PerformancePoint Server 2007 directly to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Advance Visulaisation
Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides out-of-the-box advanced visualization tools that help you gain insight into your data faster. Using visualizations like performance maps, decomposition trees, and other tools can help expedite your understanding of what is happening at any given moment in your organization.
The performance map functionality, for example, is built to help you quickly see where to focus your attention when dealing with a very large set of data, while the decomposition tree helps you discover the contributors to the data across the many dimensions of your businessThe Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator performs a detailed analysis of hardware and device compatibility for migration to Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Application Virtualization, and Windows Vista. The hardware assessment looks at the installed hardware and determines if migration is recommended. If it is not recommended then the reports tell you why it is not.
Rintegrated Performance Management
Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you drive consistency throughout your organization, span planning needs across your enterprise, extend your investments in Microsoft, and provide every employee with a stake in the corporate performance management process.
Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 makes it easy to:
• Import data from multiple sources, including multiple general ledger systems.
• Easily feed data automatically into a centralized, trusted data store.
• Embed standardized business rules and processes.
• Provide everyone with a single interface.
• Ensure that people only see appropriate and relevant information.
• Track changes automatically.
• Manage planning and budgeting processes.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 delivers on these goals first by utilizing Microsoft Office Excel as the end-user interface for planning, budgeting, and forecasting. With PerformancePoint Server 2007, Excel is where people contribute, interact, and build reports. And Excel is where end users ultimately write their changes back to a central data model that contains data on actuals side-by-side with planning data.
PerformancePoint Server 2007 data models are built to support the range of business models used in your organization, from sophisticated financial modeling to straightforward budget planning.
Built on top of the proven enterprise capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, PerformancePoint Server 2007 ensures that your performance management application can scale to meet a large user base.
SQL Server helps you easily bring together data from virtually any source across your financial and operational environment. The actual and historical information is fed into the centralized dynamic model next to the planning data, along with business definitions and rules such as allocations, budget seeding, “what if” scenarios, and more.
All of this information is presented securely in Excel, where individual contributors can use their existing knowledge and familiarity with the software to collaborate and contribute in the planning process.