Budgeting Abyss to Bliss: PerformancePoint Planning & Excel 2007

Spreadsheets: Friend or Foe?

Over half of all mid to large sized enterprises use a complicated litany of spreadsheets to manage their annual budgeting and forecasting cycles. As a finance professional in one of these organizations, you’re more than aware of this spreadsheet conundrum. On one hand Excel is so ubiquitous throughout organizations and familiar to even the most novice user that it’s hard to get users to surrender the flexibility they’ve come to expect. On the other hand, spreadsheet-based budgeting processes cause as many problems as they solve. Data integrity is perhaps the largest issue but performance runs a close second. Add to that the dollars lost in misusing talented analysts to gather data rather than analyze it and the growing concern over addressing regulatory compliance and the need to look at alternative solutions becomes inescapable.

Enter PerformancePoint Planning

PerformancePoint Planning (formerly codenamed Biz#) is a business performance management application supporting financial management and planning processes from the developers at Microsoft. PerformancePoint Planning bridges the gap between the best of the existing Microsoft Business Intelligence stack: MS SQL Server 2005 and MS Excel 2007, giving enterprises a secure and scaleable end to end solution for all their Financial Planning needs.

Attend this complimentary presentation on PerformancePoint Planning & Excel 2007 to learn more about:

The features and functionality of PerformancePoint Planning through a product demo including:
• The underlying application architecture
• Form & Report Design in Excel
• Applying business rules and models using BizModeler
• Using Security, Assignments & Workflow to design and control the business process

We’ll also be discussing the handling of consolidations, foreign currency and the features of PerformancePoint Planning that help mitigate much of the frustration associated with these more complicated requirements.

Audience: This is an ideal event for finance professionals and the IT staff who are tasked with supporting them.

About the Presenters

Troy Scott (Aculix) Troy brings a unique background to his role as a Senior Business Intelligence Specialist at Aculix, having spent five years in Finance, earning his CMA designation, followed by five years building BI solutions for Overwaitea Food Group. Since joining Aculix Troy has become a financial solutions specialist with a focus on Enterprise Reporting, OLAP and data warehousing technologies. Troy’s time in finance and IT gives him a distinctive ability to understand and translate business requirements into scaleable and portable BI solutions.

Misha Jovanovic (Microsoft) As a Business Productivity Advisor, Misha Jovanovic is responsible for Microsoft's customers throughout Western Canada. Misha consults with business leaders to identify opportunities for significantly improving team and organizational productivity through better utilization of tools and solutions that are often already in use used within the business. Misha has broad experience in the application of innovative business solutions, with a particular focus on solutions that streamline business processes, support team collaboration, and enhance corporate performance. He holds a Bachelor of Science (EE) degree from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and an MBA degree from the University of Western Ontario.