Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server FAQs

1) What business departments can benefit from Office PerformancePoint Server 2007?

IT Departments
The IT department is the heart of your organization and, all too often, is called upon to do increasingly more with fewer resources. Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) provides a comprehensive, integrated set of servers, applications, and development tools to help you plan, build, manage, and deploy a BI solution that meets the needs of the rest of your organization.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is primarily aimed at empowering the end users to define and control their own working environments. Other than the maintenance of user security, all tasks are capable of being executed by the end users, or designated departmental power users, thus relieving the IT department of day-to-day involvement in the planning, monitoring and analysis of company performance.

By making huge investments in BI across product lines, Microsoft has added value to the software that you have invested in and that your decision makers are accustomed to using. Choosing Microsoft BI will help ensure that you will not duplicate your investments in familiar products like Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System and that you can build on those investments to help meet your BI needs.

Human Resources Departments

Human Resources (HR) departments must continually sift through volumes of data to extract meaningful statistics that can help inform them about their hiring, firing, and appraisal processes. Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offers a cost-effective, streamlined suite of integrated products that can help support all aspects of the HR decision-making process.

Typical HR concerns may include:

• Head count
• Cost structures
• Personnel planning
• Employee surveys
• Career progression

The ability to forecast future trends is just as important as the capacity to view your historical data. The accuracy of HR forecasts depends on the quality of the incoming data, the likelihood of adding data in the future, and the ability to quickly input new data. By making intelligent use of the resulting scenarios and trends, your HR department will be able to anticipate, support, and implement organizational and strategic changes on time and on budget.

Microsoft BI solutions are designed to help your organization reach every employee, add value to every decision, promote collaboration, and increase business impact.

Operations

Every day your employees must interpret and deliver operational information to coworkers, customers, partners, and suppliers on paper and on the Web. By empowering your staff to regularly track and report what is actually happening across the business, you can help your enterprise become more responsive and competitive. Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) can transform valuable enterprise data into shared information that can help your organization make insightful, timely decisions at a lower total cost of ownership.

The challenge is to ensure that the information you are delivering is accurate and aligns with your corporate strategy. Microsoft BI provides a single, complete reporting platform with a scalable, extensible architecture that can help facilitate enterprise-wide dashboarding, scorecarding, and reporting. With Microsoft BI, you can create ad hoc reports to explore corporate data, gain access to
reports from third-party applications, and share information with customers and partners over the Internet.

A part of the Microsoft BI offering, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services delivers real-time information that can help support your daily operations and drive effective decision making.

Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide comprehensive scorecard and dashboard solutions that can help your employees monitor tasks, align to corporate objectives, and collaborate. And because they are integrated with the rest of Microsoft BI, they can easily help you turn insight into action and execute on your strategic and operational plans 

Finance

To provide employees with the latest data for decision making, your company’s financial department must consolidate and administer large data sets. It is likely that a variety of systems and data formats are used to gather and distribute statistics about targets, trends, and results. Often, these solutions are not able to handle new pricing models, so decision makers end up relying on spreadsheets that have no connection to live data and thus yield data inaccuracies. And when coworkers receive these spreadsheets through e-mail, there is a security risk for sensitive financial data.
 
You know that business intelligence (BI) helps you get the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right format. Microsoft BI goes one step further by offering a cost-effective, streamlined suite of integrated products that are designed to give authorized access to business-critical financial data.

Like all other financial departments, yours faces increasingly rigid compliance requirements. You need secure, efficient ways to achieve a transparent, accurate, single version of your company’s financial information and to make the same story immediately available to every authorized data-recipient throughout the organization. And you would prefer to use familiar and appropriate tools to analyze the data in a format that makes sense of individual requirements.

By using Microsoft BI solutions that are built on the powerful Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, your business managers can help ensure increased data accuracy and managed security, while employees can become real-time decision makers whose knowledgeable, productive, accountable actions can directly reflect corporate strategy.

Sales & Marketing

Your sales force is probably dealing with multiple sales channels, increasing competition, and demanding sales goals that have added layers to your company’s performance measurement and become a barrier to effective data analysis. Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offers an effective scorecarding, analytics, and planning solution that can be part of your organization’s performance management strategy.
 
With the proliferation of new direct and indirect sales channels such as the Web, your company is working to attain the level of visibility, pipeline efficiency, and speed required to react to rapidly changing market conditions. By helping you link customer information to your business processes, Microsoft BI can help make sales processes more agile and efficient for your customers and your company.

You are looking to help your company’s sales force face their daily challenges and answer their strategic questions:

• Aligning with and adapting to changes in corporate strategy
• Setting and tracking team and individual goals
• Measuring performance against goals
• Responding to fast-moving competitive environments:
• Where are we good at lead conversion?
• Which regions sell the most products?
• Why did we lose that opportunity?
• Which channels yield our best sales volumes?

More than ever, your sales force requires an intuitive, collaborative tool that can dynamically pull together critical information from different sources. Microsoft Business Intelligence offers a set of monitoring and analysis tools that can help you align strategy with accountability while clearly defining and accurately measuring every sales performance metric. In addition, Microsoft BI can be layered onto your existing sales automation applications, which can help you build on past investments for future growth.

2) How does one deploy information to SharePoint from PerformancePoint?

The SharePoint site is referenced when installing PerformancePoint and a default master page is provided. This can, of course, be changed. Deploying objects to SharePoint is just a matter of following a wizard. Once an object is deployed to SharePoint, any changes to data will automatically be reflected in the SharePoint document i.e. as the dashboard changes each month the data is automatically refreshed. The dashboard would only need to be redeployed if the design is changed in some way, e.g. add a new report object.

3) What is a ‘scorecard’?

A scorecard is a collection of key performance indicators (KPIs) and measures for a given part of the business (department, subsidiary, geographical area), usually representing an area within a manager’s responsibility.

The objects reported on are often grouped into hierarchies. For example, an objective to Improve Customer Service may be a composite measure, reported in the scorecard, but below it we would see the three items that comprise that measure of Average Call Wait, Service Error Rate and Order Fulfillment, each of which has its own performance indicator.

Items reported on a scorecard can be shown as either a value or a graphic, indicating the level of performance relative to pre-set parameters. The most common method is the traffic light effect, showing performance as being red, amber or green. But other measures such as shaded shapes, where the degree of shading represents performance or gauge charts can be used.

4) What is the ‘business modeler’?

Business Modeler is the application used to create and maintain models, dimensions, processes, security and associations. You can also administer input forms created in Excel.

Models are the data sources that hold and process the data used for reporting, planning and monitoring purposes. Typically, they are OLAP cubes but they can also be flat files or ODBC links to other databases.

Dimensions are the same as dimensions in OLAP cubes. They are collections of data about a common object e.g. customer, supplier, products. They can represent relationships in the data via hierarchies e.g. a customer belongs to a town, a town belongs to a country, a country belongs to a continent, giving us a customer geography hierarchy of Continent>Country>Town>Customer.

Processes are a collection of rules relating to the various business processes undertaken in budgeting, forecasting, planning and reporting. Rather than being forced into a set way of working, users can define their processes in PerformancePoint Server to reflect the way they work. Companies may therefore have a process for the monthly sales forecast, another for the quarterly financial budgeting and another for the annual five year projection.

Each process associates input forms with specific users, providing security over input. Additionally, the time span for the execution of assigned tasks can be defined, enabling monitoring of the performance and process status. Rules can also be set to determine the course of action to be taken should someone not perform their allocated tasks within the timescales defined.

In summary, they define who can input what data to which models and when, with escalation rules for non-compliance.

Associations are used to link models together. Business processes can be complex, with different rules applying at different points in their execution. PerformancePoint Server allows models to be created at the micro level and then associated, creating a hierarchy of models to encompass the whole process. A simple example would be to create a model to forecast sales quantities and another model to forecast sales prices. A third model would combine the two to create a financial sales forecast .This allows the input of projected sales quantities and projected price rises to be independent, making the creation what-if scenarios for different pricing strategies much easier. Associations are the rules that create the relationships between these various models and determine how the data is passed from one model to another.

5) What are ‘strategy maps’?

Strategy maps are used specifically in the Balanced Scorecard methodology devised by Kaplan and Norton. They are a means to represent the causal relationships between strategic objectives, across the four perspectives of Financial, Customer, Processes, and Learning and Growth, in a diagrammatic way. By representing corporate strategy in this way it should be easy to identify any inconsistencies. Having determined the strategy and set out the strategy map, it then becomes a concise way to communicate the strategy to various audiences.

In the context of PerformancePoint Server, strategy maps are another graphical representation of performance, as each strategic objective is colour coded according to the current performance relative to the strategy value.

6) What about ProClarity?

ProClarity analytics extends the reach of business intelligence to every decision-maker in your organization. ProClarity works with Microsoft Business Intelligence by placing the power of analytics in the hands of the people running your business. As a recent Microsoft® subsidiary, ProClarity helps Microsoft BI users identify trends, explore data, and pinpoint what is driving corporate performance—just as it has always done.

ProClarity is the foundation for the analytic capabilities in Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. With the Release of PerformancePoint Server 2007, customers who purchase PerformancePoint will also receive ProClarity 6.3.

7) How do ProClarity customers upgrade their licenses to Office PerformancePoint Server 2007?

ProClarity customers who are current on maintenance will be entitled to exchange one ProClarity Server license for one Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 license. They will also be entitled to exchange one Pro client access license, Web client access license, or Desktop Professional license for one Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 client access license.

8) How do Business Scorecard Manager customers upgrade their licenses to Office PerformancePoint Server?

Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) customers who are current on Software Assurance will be entitled to exchange one BSM Server license for one Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 license. They will also be entitled to exchange one BSM client access license for one Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 client access license. Also, they can exchange one BSM External Connector license for one Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 External Connector license.

9) How much does MOPPS cost?

Here is the pricing for Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, with general information on the cost per offering.

* Estimated retail prices based on purchase of one server; reseller pricing may vary. Microsoft volume licensing discounts may be applicable: Normal Microsoft volume licensing policies apply. All prices may vary.

For further information please contact an ICS representative on info@thebiexperts.co.uk,
+44 (161) 886 8500.

10) Who should I speak to if I want to consider implementing PerformancePoint?

To ensure professional implementation and deployment, you need to select a dedicated Microsoft Partner like ICS who specialises in Business Intelligence and PerformancePoint.

Select the ICS ‘Performance Management’ Quick Start Package to understand the benefits that Office PerformancePoint Server can afford your business and the way in which it can optimise your planning, monitoring and analytic capabilities and processes.

Click here to view the details of the ‘Performance Management’ Quick Start Package.

11) System Requirements

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 consists of three core capabilities: monitoring, analytics, and planning. These capabilities are designed to suit a variety of usage scenarios and business needs. Although Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 was built as a complete and integrated performance management application, you can also deploy the three capabilities independently.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is based on the following Microsoft programs and technologies:

• Windows Server® 2003 SP1, Standard Edition, or later
• Microsoft Windows SharePoint® Services 3.0/ Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007
• Microsoft Windows® XP Professional SP2, or later
• Microsoft Office 2003 SP2, or later
• Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 SP2, Enterprise Edition, or later
• Windows Installer 3.1, or later
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
• Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0
• ASP.NET 2.0

Click here to view the complete list of system requirements.