Analyze This

BPM solutions and, in particular, predictive analytics can give an enormous boost to a company’s profitability, providing an enterprise with the information it needs to optimize its processes and deliver the best services to its customers Michael Morrison, Chief Operating Officer, at Applix gives the lowdown on the difference a well-thought out deployment can bring and what constitutes an effective solution.

How do you achieve a successful BPM implementation? What are the key points to note? How important is this?

The most critical aspects of a successful business analytics implementation are executive sponsorship and a clearly defined project.

Business analytics implementations are all about improving business performance – collecting critical information from various parts of the business, organizing this information in an easy-to-use manner, analyzing the information in order to arrive at informed decisions, and then – most importantly – executing on these decisions. Without executive sponsorship of the business analytics initiative, the last and most crucial step (namely, executing on an informed decision) is very difficult to achieve.

Business analytics is a process, not a project. By its very nature, business analytics cuts across every aspect of an organization. It is essential to ‘fence in’ a business analytics initiative so that you can achieve discrete, continuous ‘wins’ as you seek to develop a business analytics culture throughout the organization. Each discrete ‘win’ emboldens line managers and executives to continue with the process. An overly ambitious business analytics initiative, with broad, ill-defined goals, is doomed to failure before it begins.

Applix provides a single high performance platform for planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting and analysis, how does it work? What is the thinking behind it? Who benefits from this approach?

Our approach to business analytics is based on a single, high performance platform – Applix TM1 - for planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, financial reporting and analysis. This unified platform is highly flexible, easy to implement and easy-to-use. All industry research and surveys indicate that the most prevalent barriers to success for business analytics implementations are the complexity of the solution, the performance of the solution and the user friendliness of the solution. With the Applix TM1 platform, all data, all meta-data and all business rules are in a single, unified platform. The user experience is the familiar Excel or Web interface. As a result, the platform offers a simple, user-friendly approach to business analytics. Executives and managers at all levels of an organization benefit from this ‘simplicity’ approach.

Why do you use this single high performance platform? How is it different from other offerings available?

The Applix TM1 platform is different from other business analytics offerings in that the core engine of this platform is ‘in memory’, which means that data is available to end users in real-time without the need to write or read data from a disk – which can take minutes or hours depending on the complexity and volume of the data and business rules. The Applix TM1 in-memory architecture enables users to review, analyze and act upon operating data in real time, and to perform ‘what if’ scenario planning in real time. Other business analytics solutions require timely and oftentimes cumbersome database update and recalculation processes that encumber the decision making process.

What is the ‘What-If Analysis’? What are the benefits of using a system that incorporates this analysis?

As stated above, the in-memory architecture of the solution enables users to take live operational data and perform ‘gaming’ or ‘scenario planning’ exercises and see the results in real time. For instance, an electric utility that purchases wholesale electricity from several different wholesalers every 15 minutes, based on spot rates, forecast demand, anticipated weather conditions, and several other variables – can ‘what if’ multiple buying scenarios based on these variables, and – in ‘real time’ – select which wholesalers to purchase electricity from in order to obtain the most favorable costs. Other business analytics solutions that are not memory-based cannot satisfy these real world business requirements.

What are the other requirements for business analytics solutions?

In addition to simplicity, user friendliness, performance (specifically related to speed of response and ability to handle large data volumes), a business analytics solution must handle all aspects of an organization’s analytics needs – budgeting, forecasting, planning, consolidations, reporting and analysis – and in a single, unified environment. Solutions that only handle a portion of the business analytics requirements – or that handle these requirements with multiple solutions – will not meet an organization’s most basic needs for simplicity and ease of use.

What are your plans for the future? Are there any particular areas you will be focusing on?

The Applix TM1 platform is already the highest performing and highest rated business analytics engine on the market today. We intend to extend our leadership position by continuing to invest in the scalability and speed of our core business analytics platform. We also see a huge opportunity in offering broader business analytics applications for faster ROI across the enterprise. We intend to invest heavily in enhancing the Applix TM1 platform to serve specific organizations – which we will be calling “Applix On-Demand” - that are characterized by the need to access and analyze large data, variable data and ‘high velocity’ data.