SYSPHERA
Complete CPM Application to Extend Leading BI Platforms

Today, the business environment has become more competitive and predatory. In this era of globalization, organizations have realized the importance of strategic practices for gaining a competitive edge over competitors. A well-designed performance management system can play a crucial role in streamlining the activities of the employees in an organization for realizing the ultimate corporate mission and vision. Comprehensive performance management (CPM) is fast becoming a useful tool for aligning all the major organizational functions and sub functions so that the focus is directed towards attainment of the organizational goal. “There is a need for a comprehensive solution for budgeting, planning, forecasting and consolidation to support enterprises of various sizes in any industry,” says Antonio Dutra, VP-Product Strategy, SYSPHERA. “We help organizations by retrieving and consolidating financial and operational data on a single platform, aimed at facilitating business decisions, providing managers to reconcile financial and operational data in an agile and consistent way.” The company specializes in the development and maintenance of software solutions focused on planning and control of financial, operational, and regulatory processes of a firm.

We were built from scratch to be the best CPM solution provider, with unique functions and features based on practical financial experiences

SYSPHERA was born due to the growing demand of CPM solutions felt mainly among the medium size firms. They needed affordable solutions with better Total cost of ownership (TCO), and no proprietary multidimensional databases. SYSPHERA is a solution that intends to allow organizations to get rid of all excel sheets interconnected together to build up a budgeting, planning, and Financial Consolidation processes.

Evolving Excel Sheet Process

Many organizations have made significant investments in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions and Data Warehouses. Therefore, they are building their budgets over a set of spreadsheets that offer a partial approach to the problem, creating a huge workload for those responsible. SYSPHERA retrieves data from these applications, namely MS-Excel spreadsheets and other sources, automatically reclassifying, converting, consolidating, and reporting about the same data.

As a result, analysts can spend more time on the analysis of information and dramatically reduce their time of gathering and preparing data for analysis. Consequently, the clients can benefit from more agile, intelligent, and reliable decisions.

The SYSPHERA solution complements and extends the capability of the leading BI Platforms, providing the end-users appropriate administration of their planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation processes, allowing the creation of scenarios and simulations, besides the projected KPI. “We do this through our unique metadata integration layer and the interface integration, which provides a single sign-on capability,” asserts Dutra. “Accordingly, users of MicroStrategy, QlikView and Microsoft BI Platforms can quantify and project the impact of their sales, profitability, margins and productivity without needing to work with two different solutions, to create reports incorporating both the past and the future.”

SYSPHERA provides to the customer the most advanced workflow engine on the market, completely parameterized in accordance with the procedures of the customer.

The Implementation Methodology

SYSPHERA has created an implementation methodology based on phases, which seeks to satisfy an enterprise’s demand according to their needs and drives their skills to the next stage of maturity scale aligned with the interests, resources, and customer time availability.

The first step in the Step Budget Methodology performs the alignment between the customer model, usually created using Excel spreadsheets and the new planning model that will be constructed using SYSPHERA solution. In the modeling activities, the company proposes new structures or remounts the structure in a different way. At the second stage, the Methodology improves the data load from all transaction systems, legacy data, accounting systems, production. “All model structures now include the planning scenarios and the actual scenario for comparisons,” explains Dutra. “Once the customer has the Financial Planning model fed by the budget numbers and the automatized actual numbers data load, the next step of the maturity scale proposes the dashboards creation for monitoring.” The last stage of the Step Budget Methodology represents the use of the SYSPHERA solution as a predictive tool for scenario creation and advanced simulations. The business user is able to use the advanced what if analysis, which is primordial for the fastest understanding of customer behavior, market changes, economy crisis, and new regulations.

An example illustrating the company’s expertise includes Adrianna Papell, a 35 year old, New York City based apparel firm. The client faced numerous challenges including time consuming, non collaborative, lack of timely information and updation, as they were using spreadsheets for planning and reporting. SYSPHERA was called into help the client project growth and the company started analyzing Adrianna Papell. The company installed the programs, addressed, and interfaced Microstrategy through their ERP operational Data warehouse and financial system. They then mapped the entire key operational and financial data, created a new data warehouse, and implemented detailed profit and loss planning modules that integrates both financial and operational information.

Developing better solutions

As Dutra states, “we were built from scratch to be the best CPM solution provider, with unique functions and features which were developed based on practical financial experiences.” In addition, the company has gained new heights in the market since they are attentive to market trends, especially to those that have to do with CPM solutions. The company is also focusing on the concept of “gamification” that will help them get a better understanding of a user’s learning curve. “Every single customer is very important for our company, doesn’t matter the size or the market they are into. And, for the future we want to keep evolving our product as well as investing on our professionals qualifications so the customers get the best solutions,” concludes Dutra.