PMF utilizes standard tools, including tabs, trees,
views, and forms, to provide advanced capabilities in three core
areas:
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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.
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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.
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Analysis. PMF
utilizes powerful analytic tools, which 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:
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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.
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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 Excel Connector) or an
external budgeting/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.
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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.
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User-friendly Scorecard Setup. All work flow for adding,
changing, and deleting scorecards and scorecard data, and inputof
strategies, perspectives, objectives, measures, and themes is done
through user-friendly, Web-based forms and wizards.
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Powerful Analytics. PMF has a full suite of views that
allow 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Standard Analysis Views. PMF includes a pre-packaged
set of financial, user, customer, location, time, and trend views
that allow 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.