PMF utilizes standard tools, including tabs, trees, views, and forms, to provide advanced capabilities in three core areas:

• Communication. PMF provides you with multiple ways to summarize your metrics, communicate performance trends, distribute information to constituents, show important metrics, and track related projects and processes. You can also easily set up, distribute, and centrally manage customizable dashboards for each user.
• Collaboration. PMF includes many web 2.0 style collaboration capabilities that enable users to mesh their work with that of colleagues to discover, analyze, inform, document, and act.
• Analysis. PMF utilizes powerful analytic tools that enable you to trend, track, and discover the why behind the performance of your organization.

PMF delivers these communication, collaboration, and analysis capabilities through the following functionalities:

• Fully Comment Capable. Feedback blogging enables you to instantly enter feedback comments about measures and objectives to explain variances from targets. Each instance of feedback is stored and tracked by the user, and provides valuable data including Owner ID, the date and time the feedback was entered, percent of target achieved, and indicator color at the time of input. PMF also captures information on how metrics are calibrated, allowing full compliance with audit standards.
• Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting. PMF has the capability to plug in standard budgeting and forecasting applications. These can be Information Builders produced (for example, a budgeting workflow application implemented with the WebFOCUS Connector for Excel®), or an external budgeting or forecasting system (for example, Hyperion Planning, LongView Planner, or other system). An XML-based API allows you to integrate any forecasting application with PMF, to allow PMF data to be used in the forecasting tool, and to allow output of completed forecasts into PMF to create targets.
• Customizability. Every aspect of PMF is developer customizable. The scorecards, windows, forms, style sheets, and the underlying database are built with production WebFOCUS components. You can use WebFOCUS capabilities to change, revise, or extend any part of PMF.
• User-friendly Scorecard Setup. All work flow for adding, changing, and deleting scorecards and scorecard data, and input of strategies, perspectives, objectives, measures, and themes is done through user-friendly, web-based forms and wizards.
• Powerful Analytics. PMF has a full suite of views that allows analysis of your organization metrics both with and without a strategic component. In PMF, there are many ways you can slice and dice the multi-dimensional metrics. Structured ad hoc tools provide full ad hoc capability so you can design information presentations in millions of ways. PMF data is easy to integrate with the financial, process, and operational data for your enterprise.
• Thin-client Strategy Map. Unlike many other systems, PMF includes a built-in interactive Strategy Map. Based on industry-standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), the Strategy Map has a live relationship to underlying scorecards and data and allows you to save your changes to the underlying scorecard, thus giving you an easy-to-use graphical method for updating the strategic flow of your organization.
• Multi-Dimensional Data. PMF has a built-in, cross-platform OLAP database that can be installed and used with any RDBMS. The database permits assigning measures to relationships with standard dimension types (for example, Location, Product, Customer, Time, Organization). In PMF, you can create up to 16 user-defined dimensions.
• Loading Data. PMF built-in dimension and measure loaders allow you to design your data loads and feeds for PMF using the flexible, powerful data extraction capabilities built into WebFOCUS. Scheduling your loads and feeds is an automated process.
• Scorecard Inheritance. PMF lets you cascade your scorecards so that you can create a top-level scorecard for high-level management, then let your scorecards for other levels of the organization hierarchy inherit one or more aspects of the management scorecard.
• Standard Analysis Views. PMF includes a pre-packaged set of financial, user, customer, location, time, and trend views that allows you to be instantly productive with the application as soon as it is deployed. You can also use the powerful ad hoc reporting capability of WebFOCUS to create any other views you need.

Note: You can access and use PMF from a standard web browser, including Mozilla Firefox® Version 2 and higher for any Consumer or Analyst role.