New Performance Management Software from Geac

Planning module, consolidation features are part of provider's integrated performance management software suite

Planning module, consolidation features are part of provider's integrated performance management software suite

Orlando, FL — May 10, 2005 — Software provider Geac this week launched a new release of Geac MPC, its integrated performance management software suite.

Geac said its MPC 7 is designed to give finance and business professionals in a company performance management capabilities, including strategy, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and reporting. The company added that the system in effect creates an integrated "closed loop" that can improve enterprise-wide planning and alignment, streamline reporting and make compliance easier.

According to a recent Aberdeen Group industry benchmark study, best-in-class companies deploying "closed loop" corporate performance management (CPM) systems realize on average eight percent higher gross margins than the industry norm, and have about seven points greater market share in their most profitable segments.

"New pressures require businesses to adopt holistic approaches to CPM," Lee Geishecker, vice president at IT research firm Gartner Inc., commented. "Many executives treat strategy formulation as a one-off exercise by defining a strategy and then single-mindedly following that strategy regardless of changes in the business environment. Scenario analysis should encourage — and CPM systems should enable — strategic planners to create and maintain a portfolio of alternative strategies. These can be considered when sudden, significant shifts occur in business circumstances, environmental factors or economic conditions and when data from the operations feedback loop indicates that the strategy is not achieving its objectives."

Geac said that, rather than just periodically updating a scorecard with operational results, Geac MPC 7 helps organizations to put their strategic plans into quantifiable objectives, tactics and supporting activities with assigned ownership at the correct responsibility level throughout the enterprise. The result is a collaborative environment for planning, tracking, and predicting progress toward key management objectives.

"Geac MPC 7 enables companies to define and monitor progress toward the implementation of strategies, as well as the resource allocations and activities that support them," explained Brian Hartlen, vice president of Global Marketing at Geac. "This provides a level of context in addition to the measures and financial results, which allows management to drive their business and course correct as necessary."

Geac said that MPC7 has a Planning module, which can accommodate a single planner creating "what if" operational plans to multiple teams of collaborative planners around the world. The suite also offers a new management reporting capability, featuring a creation wizard, which streamlines initial report design and shortens the time to create and deliver critical enterprise reporting.

Additionally, Geac MPC OpenLink is a Web-based mapping tool that helps move data from multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other source systems to the Geac MPC application. The provider said it is designed to work with the most popular and widely deployed ERP and general ledgers on the market.

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