#thinkprophix

Following up on our success with similar events in the first half of the year, in October I joined Prophix’s regional managers and solution engineers in five major cities. We hosted events at local restaurants to highlight the impact of automating budgeting, reporting, and forecasting, and improving executive decision making. Attendees were treated to interviews with Finance innovators from numerous companies. Here’s a look at some insights from those innovators.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, we spoke with David Whiteman, Manager of Internal Reporting at Snyder’s-Lance, a new Prophix customer. With annual revenues of $2.3 billion, Snyder’s-Lance, Inc. is the second largest salty snack maker in the United States. The company makes the Synder’s of Hanover pretzels, as well as Cape Cod Potato Chips – and earlier this year, the organization acquired Diamond Foods, which makes the Kettle Brand of potato chips. David explained how Snyder’s uses their Prophix solution to run complex allocations that help them understand the profitability of all of their products and assess the performance of their independent distributor network. Eventually, they will analyze distribution down to the store level, which will enable them to adjust and track their distribution routes.

Washington’s event saw us interview Brandy O’Shields, VP, Data Governance Lead, from National Cooperative Bank (NCB). Longtime Prophix customers, NCB addresses the financial needs of an underserved market niche, providing comprehensive banking services to all types of American cooperatives. Brandy spoke about addressing the unique challenges of the banking industry. For instance, NCB generates liquidity reports using numbers that flow from their NetSuite general ledger software through to Prophix. This shows them their cash position, total assets, and deposits. The organization’s treasury department accesses these reports daily to make funding decisions, like whether to purchase investments, to borrow, or to pay down their borrowing.

In Boston, we saw an amazing contrast between an experienced customer, Harvard Management Company (HMC), and a brand-new implementation, ALKU Technologies. Matt Meehan told the crowd how HMC, which manages the celebrated university’s $37 billion endowment, uses the software from Prophix to help manage expenses, oversee the corporate books, review actual versus budget compensation, calculate bonuses, and build their budgets. It was interesting to hear about the company’s phased approach to building out this functionality over the years, whereas ALKU, a specialized consulting services firm, is just getting started. Jon Martel, ALKU’s Accounting Manager, explained how his organization has begun to automate the creation and distribution of a 30-page report binder, which includes advanced revenue reporting that will help influence the decision making for ALKU’s sales and recruiting leaders.

New Haven’s event featured a conversation with Robin Sheridan from Criterium, which specializes in running clinical research trials for pharmaceutical companies. Criterium are currently undergoing their first budget cycle with Prophix. Their unique business model suggests that they’ll have a fascinating use case in time. Companies use CPM software from companies like Prophix to track their revenues and expenses at the detailed level. This capability will be essential for Criterium; the company needs to account for 90% of their revenue because most of it gets billed back to their pharmaceutical clients. So not only does the company’s Finance Department need to record every activity, they also need to track milestones and ensure that their billings align with their client contracts.

In Philadelphia we spoke with another new customer, Colt Templin, Manager, Budget & Financial Analysis, from UPMC Insurance Services. With $7 billion in annual revenues, UPMC runs one of America’s fastest-growing health plans. Colt explained how he uses Prophix’s business modeling function to correlate the Insurance Division’s expenses with the Provider Division’s revenues. He also oversees a personnel budget consisting of 3,000 full-time employees, the oversight of which involves approving or denying the recruitment of new positions or replacements, dependent upon budget capacity. Personnel planning is a common function used by Prophix customers, but it’s compelling to hear how this impacts a business like UPMC Insurance Services in the real world.

Prophix Software, a global leader in Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software, announced that Chief Operating Officer, Alok Ajmera has been appointed to the expanded role of President & COO. The move comes at an opportune time as Prophix released a cloud-based Corporate Performance Management software offering to offer a choice of deployment options to users.

As COO, Alok’s leadership ensures Prophix remains laser focused on delivering an exceptional user experience and to provide prospective customers and partners around the globe the best Prophix has to offer in services and software. The new responsibility as President pulls all essential business functions under his leadership, to better position the team for global growth.

“It’s an honor to be named President & COO of the Prophix family,” said Alok Ajmera, Prophix President & COO. “I have witnessed the immense talent, dedication, and fortitude our people exhibit every day; I look forward to our continued success.”

At Prophix, we like to support local programs and charities to give back to the community where we work, and so many of us live. Recently, the Prophix team got together to support an important cause and enjoy a walk through Mississauga parks.

Interim Place has been providing shelter, support, counselling and advocacy to help abused women and their children break the cycle of violence for over 35 years. Since 1981 Interim Place has assisted well over 40,000 women and children over the years, find safety, heal and build new lives free of abuse.

Each year, Interim Place hosts a fundraising event called “Steps to End Violence Against Women Walk,” It’s a three-kilometre stroll that is dedicated to remembering women in Mississauga who lost their lives to violence.

The Prophix team was honoured to raise funds and participate in the walk. Thanks to Prophix matching employee donations, we raised about $2000 to support Interim Place, and they kindly awarded us as the Top Corporate Team for raising the most funds!

Every dollar goes a long way, for example:

• $75.00 provides a Rescue Ride to help a woman and her children escape to safety

• $250.00 provides a Shelter Welcome kit which includes new pajamas, undergarments, socks, slippers, bathrobes, toiletries and personal items

• $750 provides a Fresh Start for a mom and her two children to settle into their new permanent home in the community.

• $1,080 provides one year of free, confidential 24-hour crisis counselling for one woman experiencing abuse in the community to keep herself and her children safe and a plan to safely escape.

• $1,440 provides 24-hour a day access to one-to-one and group counselling for a woman with three children during their four-month shelter stay.

Let’s face it, the way in which most business data is presented to users is boring and difficult to use. Endless pages of tables, unreadable font sizes and limited flexibility/interactivity all add up to a frustrating and less than optimal user experience.

Why does it have to be so difficult to understand and action what your data is telling you about the performance of your operations, the dynamics of your market and the needs of your customers?

Humans are visual creatures and it’s so much more intuitive for us to identify trends, uncover relationships and plan for the future when this information is presented in graphical form. Add to this the power of interactivity enabled by structured analytical models and now this data can now truly help to supercharge your organization’s decision making.

At Prophix, we firmly believe in the power of visualization to drive better insight and action. We are driving hard to make the Prophix experience more visual in every way. Prophix Visual Analytics is the engine powering the new Dashboard Interactive Charting capabilities in our latest release. Using these tools, organizations will be able to accelerate their analysis and enhance their flexibility to see data from all perspectives.

But this is just the beginning of our journey. Over the coming months, we will also be looking to integrate these interactive visual capabilities into more of Prophix. Imagine being able to adjust and iterate your budgets and manipulate forecasts, quickly and easily by interacting with a graph or chart, rather than having to input values into a worksheet or manage complex spreadsheets.

With these enhanced “visual” capabilities, analysis and planning become democratized, enabling more and more users across your organization to become engaged in and contribute to the process.