SymphonyRPM today announced it has added new reporting, personalization and ease-of-use features that support collaborative decision-making and rapid delivery of analytics-driven applications to market. An intuitive, highly-customizable Web-based interface draws on the powerful performance management capabilities of the SymphonyRPM platform, while consolidating multiple business scenarios into a single workspace to enable effective execution of forward-looking strategies.

"For senior executives and product managers in data-intensive markets such as retail/CPG and financial services, it is increasingly important to improve the performance of existing investments in data warehouse, business intelligence and analytics technologies," said Mark Smith, CEO of Ventana Research. "SymphonyRPM provides a powerful platform that not only draws on existing enterprise data and knowledge, but also centralizes it and makes it available in easy-to-understand and navigable reports that support better forward-looking decision-making at all levels of the organization."

SymphonyRPM partners and customers can now benefit from a number of new features that were created to take decision-making and report creation out of the hands of the information technology team and into the hands of end-users - whether in the executive suite or on the shop floor - who need to make well-informed decisions based on logical capture and easy-to-understand display of data and trends. In order to facilitate rapid application development and report generation in a Web-based environment, SymphonyRPM has introduced several new features, including:

-- Custom Hierarchies and Custom Dimensional Views - These features enable role or user-specific views of information using multi-level access, drag-and-drop and dynamic hierarchy generation while offering personalization to a user or group. This way, users can go into the Web application and view products, jobs or various business scenarios in a manner that suits them best.

-- Application Building Blocks - Every workspace in the Web application is made up of intuitive "pages" and "panes" that take users through a step-by-step process for creating intuitive, role-based front-end applications. Users can import templates and utilize SymphonyRPM's special read-write capabilities and create dynamic or scheduled analytic views.

-- Design Wizard - Creating reports and sharing business scenarios with project stakeholders at all levels of the organization has never been easier. SymphonyRPM's Design Wizard takes users through three simple steps--resulting in a directed process flow application that illustrates workflows using an unlimited number of pages, text-based pane types, interactive click-and-drag pane layout/positioning and more than 30 standard graphing types.

These new features deliver all the relevant data and information decision makers need, at the point of work, enabling business users to visualize "what-if" activity and results on the same page. Using SymphonyRPM's patent pending DecisionFlow(TM) technology, users can build complete decision-centric solutions in an integrated, easy-to-use environment.

"There aren't many solutions available on the market that can conduct modeling in multiple dimensions like SymphonyRPM," said Wayne Eckerson, director of research at The Data Warehousing Institute. "The new custom hierarchies, application building blocks and Design Wizard make SymphonyRPM's platform even easier to use, providing customers with the advanced analytics they need to make smarter decisions across the entire enterprise."

SymphonyRPM is distinguished among its business performance management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) peers by breaking down departmental silos and providing a centralized decision-making platform that is truly focused on driving future performance, not simply tying together disparate, financial processes. Unlike transactional-driven systems that focus on automating processes such as in ERP, CRM and SCM systems, SymphonyRPM incorporates and automates the entire decision-making cycle - from forecasting and multi-plan synchronization and alignment, to ad-hoc "what if" analysis and structured decision workflow. SymphonyRPM provides users with the ability to consolidate forecast and planning data to create a single holistic view of business goals and objectives - while enabling users to test results against projected strategies and make adjustments on-the-fly.

"There continues to be a disconnect in the enterprise between historical reporting and forward-looking, decision-centric performance management. SymphonyRPM brings it all together by providing the only platform on the market capable of delivering enterprise solutions that help business users manage forward execution in a closed-loop environment that everyone is comfortable with," Jim Clayton, president, SymphonyRPM, Inc. "Our platform offers a code-free modeling environment that is virtually limitless in terms of cross-functional hierarchies and dimensions. For many people in this industry, "operationalizing business intelligence" is just a catch-phrase, but SymphonyRPM actually delivers on what that term is meant to be - consistently delivering information in easy-to-access and understand formats that support managers and employees in daily decision-making situations."

Additional enhancements to the SymphonyRPM enterprise platform include:

-- Added infrastructure that allows for continuous optimizations through data compression and complex queries/float arrays.

-- New platform APIs for resource monitoring (i.e., HP OpenView), complex query building and user defined error messages.

-- Front-end capabilities such as providing for hierarchical calculated members.

-- Report publishing capabilities in HTML, PDF or Excel formats; reports can now be accessed as attachments or links.

-- Personalized user preferences.

Enhancements to the SymphonyRPM enterprise platform are available immediately.