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Infor PM BPA: Budget Management System, Consolidation System, Financial Simulation

Infor PM BPA is the leading Performance Management Solution delivered in Japan and Asia Pacific by Triforce Global Solutions. The application suite encompasses integrated solutions for financial and operational planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, reporting, and analysis. The system operates with SunSystems and across other general ledger databases.

The application allows organizations to collect data quickly over the Internet and consolidate and store the information in a central, secure database. This ensures that the entire organization works from a single version of information. From there, a variety of automated processes, guided workflow capabilities, built-in financial functions, and a familiar Microsoft Excel user interface combine to help people complete their tasks accurately, on time, and within established guidelines. The end result is more efficient and effective management of the company.

Please click on module links for details:

Budgeting

With Infor PM BPA's budgeting capabilities, companies gather budget numbers via the web or integrated spreadsheets rather than by assembling and consolidating individual spreadsheets. Doing so speeds the collection process and eliminates the need to re-key data and fix broken spreadsheet links, activities that often result in errors and version-control issues. Once approved, budget figures -- and even notes explaining the rationale behind them -- are saved to the secure BPA database, meaning that a single set of data is now used across the organization. BPA's built-in financial features -- such as automatic roll-ups and calculations, support for multiple currencies, and an understanding of how to mathematically treat debits and credits -- further help ensure data integrity and save time. When business conditions require a budget modification, the organization need only modify the figure once; the change is automatically available throughout the BPA database, keeping the plan in line with changing business needs. Because BPA stores information in the central database, system users can compare budgets to actual results and forecasts side by side and on demand, without the need to open or navigate multiple applications.

With Infor PM BPA's budgeting capabilities, you can:

• Reduce the time needed to collect data and prepare budgets.
• Eliminate version-control issues.
• Automate roll-ups, calculations, and currency conversions to save time and reduce errors.
• Monitor budget submissions and actual results for increased accountability.
• Plan salaries and assets at the detail level for more accurate budgets.
• Set up automatic alerts to notify you when something unexpected -- good or bad -- is happening, so you can take action.
• Adjust budgets and communicate changes when business conditions change, maintaining the plan's relevancy and the organization's commitment to it.

Financial Consolidation

Web-based Infor PM BPA enables organizations to quickly collect data from operating units around the world, even when these locations have disparate general ledger systems, charts of accounts, and ERP systems. Data is consolidated in line with local and international requirements, such as GAAP, Sarbanes-Oxley, and IFRS, and is stored in a single database, ensuring that everyone works with the same set of numbers, accessing data from an Excel or web interface. Any changes are made in this central location, resulting in greater control and confidence in the numbers. Data can be compared with budgets, plans, and forecasts within Infor PM BPA, which improves business performance management insight. With detailed journal and audit capabilities, Infor PM BPA provides financial reporting transparency to satisfy both internal and external auditors alike.

With Infor PM BPA's financial consolidation capabilities, you can:

• Adhere to local and global accounting standards and reporting requirements such as GAAP, FASB, IAS, IFRS, and Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Gain more process control through the centralized storage and maintenance of data.
• Speed financial consolidation and reporting by automating key processes such as data loading, consolidation, and verification.
• Collect, process, report, and analyze data in multiple currencies, and report on the impact of currency fluctuations.
• Carry out automated adjustments including minority interest, intercompany eliminations, recurring adjustments, and miscellaneous adjustments.
• Consolidate data from various business perspectives (geographic region, product line, etc.) and multiple structure versions (this year's results, last year's results, etc).
• Turn data into useful information by comparing results against budgets and forecasts.

Strategic Planning

Using Infor PM BPA's strategic planning functionality, organizations visibly link their corporate objectives to operational budgets, people and departments, daily activities, and financial and nonfinancial performance measures. This easy-to-use application allows people to not only view results, but also to investigate to what extent and how well initiatives are being implemented, determine whether initiatives are having the intended effect, and make changes when necessary to achieve established goals. This flexible application accommodates a variety of planning methodologies, including the Balanced Scorecard.

With Infor PM BPA's strategic planning functionality, you can:

• Create, communicate, deploy, monitor, and manage corporate strategic plans.
• Assess plan success in an instant with the help of color-coded measures and graphically depicted cause-and-effect relationships.
• Encourage accountability by assigning responsibilities and reporting the effect those activities have on corporate plans.
• Create on-demand reports that reveal not only what is happening but why it is happening.
• Perform analyses to reveal which activities are adding value and which ones are draining resources that could be used better elsewhere.

Financial and Operational Planning

With Infor PM BPA, companies model the financial and operational impact of new products, mergers and acquisitions, investments, revised profit targets, reorganizations, competitive activity, and more in minutes. Using a familiar Microsoft Excel interface, planners can add, change, and delete data and organizational structures at will and in real time. The software performs all calculations and recalculations, enabling planners to focus on analyses rather than on data linking and mathematics. Plan results can help drive resource allocation during the budgeting process, and can be used for comparisons against budgets, actuals, and forecasts during the year.

With Infor PM BPA's Financial and Operational planning capabilities, you can:

• Make faster, more informed decisions about investments, reorganizations, mergers, and more.
• Create contingency plans.
• Import data from other strategic and operational plans to build new planning models.
• Enter a high-level financial target needed to achieve a desired result, then let the system automatically adjust the values of chosen plan variables to achieve the goal.
• Gain insight by reviewing plans from a variety of perspectives, including product, strategic initiative, geographical region, best/worst/most likely scenario, and more.
• Compare plans, forecasts, and budgets side by side.
• Use plan data to jump-start the budgeting and forecasting process.

Forecasting

With Infor PM BPA, a planner selects a subset of data on which to base a prediction and the number of periods to be forecasted. The software analyzes the data, taking past trends and seasonal patterns into account, applies the most appropriate statistical technique, and generates a benchmark forecast within moments. The benchmark forecast may be used as a "reality check" against other submitted forecasts. The application provides error and confidence rates for each forecast, enabling the organization to make informed decisions about the information being presented. Forecast results can be used to seed plans and budgets, and for comparison against actual results.

With Infor PM BPA's forecasting capabilities, you can:

• Generate statistically accurate benchmark forecasts, even if you don't possess statistical expertise.
• Compare statistical forecasts against user-submitted plans and budgets to eliminate the likelihood of game playing.
• Uncover trends, seasonality, and other performance variations, and display them graphically for improved comprehension and insight.
• Enable early-warning email alerts to notify management when gaps between performance goals and forecasted performance are projected, allowing timely corrective action to be implemented.
• Use results to set realistic business performance expectations for employees, management, shareholders, and others.

Reporting

Using Infor PM BPA, you can take data from BPA and other systems and automatically generate and distribute reports and books of reports based on the organization's defined schedule and delivery criteria. You control not only which people receive which reports, but also who sees what data within those reports. Data can be presented in the most useful format for the recipient, such as color-coded charts, tables, and spreadsheets. Best of all, companies set up the application once and then can forget about it, letting the software perform the administrative tasks and freeing business professionals to perform the critical analysis.

With Infor PM BPA's reporting capabilities, you can:

• Automate production of financial reports such as balance sheets, statements of cash flow, and profit and loss statements to save time.
• Report on nonfinancial information, trends, and transactional data to achieve a more complete understanding of the business environment and results.
• Manipulate ("slice and dice") data within electronic reports to view results from the most useful perspective (time period, strategic initiative, product line, business unit, etc.).
• Use MPC's security features to control who has access to the information in the reports.
• Choose from multiple report formats (PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, and others) and multiple delivery methods (email, web portal, printer, network server, or a combination) to meet the organization's needs.

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