PMF utilizes standard tools, including tabs, trees,
views, and forms, to provide advanced capabilities in three core
areas:
- Strategy. Your strategy is how you to select, organize, and align your goals, or objectives. Your goals are what you want to have happen.
They start with words like improve or increase, have specificity, and contain timelines.
- Metrics. In PMF, metrics are linked to your business goals, or your strategy. Metrics are seen as the percent achieved towards a target,
and not a specific value, such as an individual sum.
- Actions. In PMF, Actions, or projects, are your initiatives. Their role is to create a change in goal performance. Projects are linked
to your goals and use details such as tasks and milestones to help you successfully reach the goals they are aligned with.
PMF delivers these communication, collaboration, and analysis
capabilities through the following functionalities:
Strategy:
- 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.
- 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.
This gives you an easy-to-use graphical method for updating the
strategic flow of your organization.
- 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.
- To-Do Lists. The Strategy To-Do List enables you to quickly view progress as you assemble and maintain Strategic scorecards. The list
analyzes the steps that you have already taken to assemble these scorecards, and shows you what you need to do next to complete
your strategies.
Metrics:
- Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting. PMF
has the capability to plug in standard budgeting and forecasting
applications. These can be Information Builders-produced, or external budgeting or forecasting systems. An open API allows
you
to integrate any forecasting application with PMF in order to allow PMF
data to be used in the forecasting tool, and to allow output of
completed forecasts into PMF to create targets.
- 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. These powerful analytic tools enable you to trend, track,
and discover the why behind the performance of your organization.
- Dashboard Designer. The Dashboard Designer is a design canvas that lets you assemble any Dashboard you want. You can configure and customize
different Dashboards using the set of available gadgets listed in the Gadget Catalog. These gadgets provide you with multiple
ways to summarize your metrics, communicate
performance trends, distribute information to constituents, and show
important metrics.
- 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 15 user-defined dimensions.
- 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.
- 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.
Actions:
- Alerts. The PMF Alerts system enables you to set up notifications that warn you if a particular goal or metric is in danger of not
being reached. They can also notify you of a positive status change of a particular metric or goal. PMF Alerts can be easily
created using the Alert Wizard. You can also create, view, or change alerts from the Actions gadget on your Dashboard.
- Projects. The PMF Projects system allows you to measure and manage projects. Using the Project panel, you can easily create, assign,
track, and update the status on project-level tasks.
- Fully Comment Capable. Feedback
blogging enables you to instantly enter feedback comments about
measures and objectives in order 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.
- 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.
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.