Accenture, AspenTech Ally

Joint performance management solution lets process companies collect, analyze enterprise data

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Tempe, AZ — April 3, 2003 — Accenture and Aspen Technology today announced that they have developed a new solution aimed at helping chemical companies and petroleum refiners collect and analyze data across their organization, with the goal of making it easier for the companies' executives to make more-informed decisions on their manufacturing and supply chain operations.

The new performance management solution is designed to provide these companies with the business processes and software necessary to improve productivity, quality and customer service, Accenture and Aspen Technology said.

According to the two solution providers, the joint offering has been developed specifically for the process industries and incorporates a new application to help companies manage and improve their complex operating processes. The focus of the Aspen Performance Scorecard application is to allow manufacturers to track the way their plants and supply chain are operating, and to enable them to review their progress against key performance indicators (KPIs), analyze situations where business objectives are not being met and manage corrective actions.

"Traditional performance-management products have failed to provide process manufacturers with the information and decision-support tools they need to improve operating performance," said David McQuillin, president and CEO of AspenTech. McQuillin said that the new solution would enable companies to integrate valuable data from operational systems across their enterprises and make better decisions based on a clear understanding of the business impact.

The Performance Management solution is the latest offering from AspenTech's alliance with Accenture. Accenture helped identify the individual software components to build the solution and the key performance indicators that each product should support, and then integrated the many different components into the joint offering.

The Aspen Performance Scorecard uses an advanced Web-based architecture to capture operating data from a range of systems across an organization, including standard business systems, as well as complex plant and supply chain systems such as planning, yield accounting, quality management, modeling and simulation applications. The new product is pre-configured to collect raw data and to structure it in a form that is suitable for analysis and storage.

The application then uses a range of data management, scorecarding, reporting and analysis components to transform the data into information that can be used for decision-making. The system can provide reports based on key performance indicators; analysis using historical performance information; support for corrective action and initiative tracking; and alerts on deviations from expected performance.

These capabilities are presented to executives and managers via portals that are tailored to the needs of each particular user.

"The ability of process manufacturers to align their plant and supply chain operations with corporate objectives can deliver tremendous economic value," said David Crow, managing partner of Accenture's Chemicals industry group and the partner who oversees Accenture's alliance with AspenTech.

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