Following the success of the proof of concept (POC) for PerformancePoint Planning at leading clothing, footwear and textiles retailing group, Edcon, Microsoft Gold Certified partner, IS Partners, has been selected for delivery of the solution.
"In association with Microsoft, and through our own funding investment, IS Partners developed the POC for Edcon based on critical success factors from the group's business users," says Pierre Naude, PerformancePoint product manager at IS Partners.
"We engaged with IS Partners for the delivery of the PerformancePoint Server 2007 solution due to their extensive and ongoing involvement in the Technical Adoption Programme (TAP), and the fact that they have been working with PerformancePoint since February 2006," says Quimby Bunce, Edcon Account Manager at Microsoft South Africa.
IS Partners was involved in the initial implementation of Edcon's current BI solution, using SQL Server and ProClarity, and so has a thorough understating of the environment.
"Microsoft certainly appreciates IS Partners' involvement in demonstrating the value of our technology to Edcon, and the critical part they played in the overall success of the process," Bunce adds.
Edcon had a business requirement to establish a financial reporting, consolidation and budgeting and forecasting solution. "A solution was required that would enable easier and faster preparation of management packs, financial and operational reports as well as budget and forecast preparation and submission processes," says Naude.
The business further required automation of data capture from their current Oracle General Ledger (GL) system and automation of financial and operational reports using the GL data. Other manually captured data, such as exchange and interest rates, was also required for reporting purposes.
The solution will replace Edcon's current reporting solution and standalone Excel spreadsheets, which were widely used by the finance department for reporting, budgeting and forecasting.
"Edcon chose PerformancePoint as the preferred solution due to the ease of use, familiar Microsoft Office environment, ease of integration into our current BI solution and completeness of functionality, from financial consolidations to scorecards and dashboards using PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics," says Calvin Low, Business Integration Executive at Edcon.
Edcon has put an implementation team together that includes staff from IS Partners, Edcon, Accenture, Harvey Jones and Solver.
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