Geac Launches MPC 7 Performance Management Software
September 09 2005 - 9:30AM
PR Newswire (US)
Early adopter customers praise advanced financial planning and
consolidation functionality, enterprise scalability and reporting
flexibility of industry's only open, fully integrated PM solution
MARKHAM, ON and SOUTHBOROUGH, MA, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
Geac(R) (TSX: GAC and NASDAQ: GEAC), a global provider of software
solutions to the CFO, today announced the immediate availability of
Geac MPC 7, a major new release of its flagship integrated
performance management software. Early adopter customers praised
Geac MPC 7 for its new enterprise collaborative planning
capability, enhanced consolidation functionality and new reporting
capabilities. The new release of Geac MPC continues to build on the
single application architecture that is the hallmark of MPC. It
further enables large deployments of performance management
applications across Global 2000 organizations without adding
onerous application support and systems maintenance requirements.
Geac MPC also retains its open architecture, allowing it to be
implemented along side of existing applications and systems; as a
result, customers can "extend and enhance" their systems, rather
than undertake the more expensive and disruptive "rip and replace"
approach. Geac MPC 7 is an open, fully integrated, "closed loop"(1)
performance management software offering, built as a single
application on a common schema to ensure data consistency and to
provide a rapid time to value for customers who are looking to
unify their business processes. MPC 7 affords large enterprises the
flexibility to put powerful performance management capabilities -
including strategy, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation
and reporting -in the hands of finance and business professionals
across an organization, while preserving centralized control of
critical information. The new release of Geac's performance
management application builds on its history of innovation and
market success. For example, Geac MPC recently received the highest
ratings among all competitive offerings in Ventana Research's 2005
Performance Management Vendor and Product Scorecard. "By focusing
our efforts on meeting customers' requirements for a highly
functional, open and integrated performance management solution,
Geac has successfully differentiated itself from virtually every
other vendor - especially those whose primary agenda appears to be
driving sales of their proprietary software tools, platforms, and
applications," said Brian Hartlen, Geac's vice president of global
marketing. "Geac's approach - allowing customers to extend their
existing investment in platforms, applications and systems - stands
in strong contrast to our competitors, who require customers to rip
out and replace a lot of existing systems, effectively creating a
closed environment. We made the strategic decision to design Geac
MPC to be a single management system that would be open to, and
integrate with, all of the different applications, database
technologies, ERP, BI and reporting tools in which companies have
already invested." Geac MPC 7 supports Oracle and SQL Server
databases, and works with Microsoft Reporting and Analysis
Services, the fastest-growing business intelligence platform on the
market(2). Key Geac MPC 7 enhancements The most notable functional
enhancements in Geac MPC 7 are in its planning, financial
consolidation and reporting capabilities. "Geac MPC 7 advances how
enterprise-wide strategic and operational business planning should
be done," said Stan Elbaum, vice president at Aberdeen Group, an
industry research firm. "By adding a Microsoft Excel front-ended
collaborative planning capability to MPC, Geac MPC 7 helps
organizations close the gap between the traditional 'top down'
strategy process and 'bottom up' budgeting process by putting it
all into one seamless application. The result is a collaborative,
closed loop environment for planning, tracking, and predicting
progress toward key management objectives." New Geac enterprise
planning capability Geac MPC 7 offers a sophisticated planning
application geared toward simplifying the planning process, from a
single planner creating "what if" operational plans to multiple
teams of collaborative planners around the world, driven through
the defacto standard interface for planning: Microsoft Excel. A
planner may set a high-level target needed to achieve a desired
profitability percentage, for example, and then let the system
adjust ("spread") the values of the chosen plan variables to
achieve the goal. Planners may also add, delete, or change business
assumptions and structures at will and in real time. This creates a
much more nimble planning environment that also drives changes in
operational plans and budgets for the enterprise. As a result,
alignment throughout the organization occurs quickly and
efficiently, and communication is dramatically enhanced. Because
the application is built on the Geac MPC financial application
foundation with centralized controls, business users can
collaborate on the same plan without having to keep track of how
the changes made through the planning process will be driven into
the "system of record." Geac's planning capability organizes and
manages the sharing of structures and data across the planning
environment, allowing the information to be used to seed the
budget, measure operational plans, or build long-range strategic
planning models. Smarter financial consolidation Geac MPC 7 also
contains a "smarter" financial consolidation module. Responding to
the increasing demands on the financial consolidation process, Geac
has added the capability to calculate information within a focus
range to get the answers required for any process. The result is
much faster turnaround on calculating the impact of changes in
data, logic or organization structure. Tshifhiwa Makhari, an early
adopter user of Geac MPC 7 at Barloworld, a US$3 billion
international industrial brand management company, said: "Running
partial consolidations, focusing specifically on the areas where
information has changed, will reduce consolidation times by up to
30 percent." Easier, more flexible reporting Geac MPC 7 offers a
new reporting capability that allows users to create sophisticated
formalized reporting in whatever manner best suits the
organization, providing optimal flexibility in terms of both report
content and formatting. Microsoft Excel power users often want to
do highly personalized analysis and reporting from their
performance management systems. MPC 7 extends the current Excel
Services functionality to deliver Excel cell-based reporting
capabilities. Users can leverage the data in the centralized
application without giving up the flexibility they need to create
virtually any layout they choose without the need for pre-built
views, templates, or formatting requirements. "Allowing free-form
report creation in Excel gives our users the power to get at and
use the information they need to drive our business," said Rob
McCloskey, Manager of Financial Systems & Sales Reporting at
Baker & Taylor, a leading full-line distributor of books,
video, and music products to Internet and traditional retailers and
library customers. "We can gain tremendous benefit from using the
full integration into Excel offered by Cell-Based Reporting in MPC
7. It allows us to generate pre-built, customized and highly
formatted Excel report books in a very efficient and timely
manner," added Barloworld's Makhari. Simplified ERP integration
Geac MPC OpenLink is a Web-based mapping tool that simplifies the
process of accurately moving data from multiple enterprise resource
planning (ERP) and other source systems to the Geac MPC
application. OpenLink is designed to work with the most popular and
widely deployed ERP and general ledgers on the market. "We expect
Geac's OpenLink functionality will save us a substantial amount of
time in the consolidation process at period-end, as we empower our
users to load their own Trial Balances from our ERP system directly
into Geac MPC," said Marjory Jervis, Senior Financial Systems
Analyst at Renishaw plc, a UK-based precision instruments
manufacturer. Geac MPC Fast-Track is a set of packaged application
integrations between MPC and several Geac ERP offerings. Fast-Track
integrations available with the Geac MPC 7 release include Geac E
Series, Geac M Series, Geac SmartStream, and Geac System21. Geac
MPC 7 is generally available immediately from the Geac direct sales
force and authorized distributors and partners worldwide.
Additional product information is available at
http://www.geac.com/page/management_applications_PM.html. About
Geac Geac (TSX: GAC and NASDAQ: GEAC) is a global enterprise
software company that addresses the needs of the Chief Financial
Officer. Geac's best-in-class technology products and services help
organizations do more with less in an increasingly competitive
environment, amidst growing regulatory pressure, and in response to
other business issues confronting the CFO. Further information is
available at http://www.geac.com/ or through e-mail at . This press
release may contain forward-looking statements of Geac's
intentions, beliefs, expectations and predictions for the future.
These forward-looking statements often include use of the future
tense with words such as "will," "may," "intends," "anticipates,"
"expects" and similar conditional or forward-looking words and
phrases. These forward-looking statements are neither promises nor
guarantees. They are only predictions that are subject to risks and
uncertainties, and they may differ materially from actual future
events or results. Geac undertakes no obligation to update or
revise the information contained herein. Important factors that
could cause a material difference between these forward-looking
statements and actual events include, among other things: our
ability to increase revenues from new license sales, cross-sell
into our existing customer base and reduce customer attrition;
whether we can identify and acquire synergistic businesses and, if
so, whether we can successfully integrate them into our existing
operations; whether we are able to deliver products and services
within required time frames and budgets to meet increasingly
competitive customer demands and performance guaranties; risks
inherent in fluctuating international currency exchange rates in
light of our global operations and the unpredictable effect of
geopolitical world and local events; whether we are successful in
our continued efforts to manage expenses effectively and maintain
profitability; our ability to achieve revenue from products and
services that are under development; the uncertain effect of the
competitive environment in which we operate and resulting pricing
pressures; and whether the anticipated effects and results of our
new product offerings and successful product implementation will be
realized. These and other potential risks and uncertainties that
relate to Geac's business and operations are summarized in more
detail from time to time in our filings with the United States
Securities and Exchange Commission and with the Canadian Securities
Administrators. Please refer to Geac's most recent quarterly
reports available through the website maintained by the SEC at
http://www.sec.gov/ and through the website maintained by the
Canadian Securities Administrators and the Canadian Depository for
Securities Limited at http://www.sedar.com/ for more information on
risk factors that could cause actual results to differ. Geac is a
registered trademark of Geac Computer Corporation Limited. All
other marks are trademarks of their respective owners.
----------------------------- (1) According to market research firm
Aberdeen Group, a "closed loop" approach to performance management
comprises four inter-related phases: - Strategies and Objectives:
establishing the strategic targets and assumptions - Derived
Targets and Metrics: determining the holistic and specific set of
operational programs and metrics against which to measure
performance; difference targets, and strategies - Execution: the
implementation /operationalizing of the plan - Measurement and
Analysis: determining how to go forward in terms of modifying
future plans, assumptions, and decision-making based on evaluation
of actual results An Aberdeen Group industry benchmark study found
that best-in-class companies deploying "closed loop" corporate
performance management (CPM) systems realize on average eight
percent higher gross margins than the industry norm, and have about
seven points greater market share in their most profitable
segments. (2) Business Intelligence Software Market Grows 12
Percent in 2004 (Gartner ID Number: G00130216) by Colleen Graham,
published August 15, 2005 - "New license sales for business
intelligence software grew 12 percent from 2003 to 2004. Microsoft
led with 53 percent growth for its BI platform offering in the
composite BI market." DATASOURCE: Geac Computer Corporation Limited
CONTACT: David Domeshek, Geac, (508) 871-5064, ; Christian Potts,
FitzGerald Communications, (617) 585-2231, ; Investor Contact:
Laura Hindermann, Geac, (508) 871-5045,
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