With dashboards, scorecards and web- and Excel-based analysis capabilities, Cartesis Analytics combines intuitive visualization with powerful analysis to meet the diverse business performance management needs of executives, managers and operational users, all of whom need timely performance data in easy-to-digest formats to facilitate financial consolidation, planning, budgeting and forecasting.

A fully integrated component of the Cartesis 10 software suite, Cartesis Analytics shares a single database with Cartesis Finance and Planning applications and can access that database to pull in data from either application. There's no wait, as Cartesis 10's zero-latency capabilities deliver real-time business performance management data to Cartesis Analytics users, enabling earlier visibility into results, thus reducing closing and planning cycles. The suite's financial intelligence ensures that conflicting data and other discrepancies, such as different currencies, are standardized so that users get consistent information in the manner that they expect.

Real-Time Analytics, Inside and Out

Cartesis Analytics offers a variety of drill-down and drill-through options as well as sophisticated exception monitoring to allow users to investigate business performance and identify specific organizational dynamics, trends and events and the drivers behind them. Business users can create Cartesis Analytics applications without IT intervention and access statutory, operational, financial and non-financial information including industry benchmarks.

"Traditional business intelligence software solutions provide scorecards and dashboards that let users observe the static, historical performance of their business," said Crispin Read, CMO of Cartesis. "With Cartesis 10, if a user spots an unexpected condition, action is a mouse click away. If plans do not fit current business conditions, they can immediately be changed. If an entity submits new actuals during a financial close, they are available for analysis and re-forecasting in real time."

In addition, Cartesis Analytics can be configured to access data sources outside of Cartesis applications. Companies can embed Cartesis Analytics within Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005. This flexibility and smooth integration allows users to remain within familiar working environments, promotes rapid adaptation, and encourages application use and collaboration with colleagues.

And as a result of Cartesis' unique partnership with EDGAR Online, Cartesis Analytics customers can benchmark their own actual and forecast figures against competitive and peer-group BPM data. This enables them to identify areas where they are falling behind industry peers or competitors, such as revenue growth, gross profit margin, inventory turns, cash position and key ratios such as performance activity and liquidity.

"Most business performance management systems are too internally focused or are unable to deliver market data in real time to the people who need it as the basis for better decision making," remarked Trevor Walker, vice president of marketing, Cartesis North America. "Cartesis Analytics puts this critical benchmarking data in the hands of users with the same rich set of features and zero latency with which it delivers internal data for true externally focused performance management."

About the Author

Dean Lombardo
business performance management