Geac has announced the immediate availability of Geac MPC 7, a major new release of its performance management software which includes new enterprise collaborative planning capability, enhanced consolidation functionality and new reporting capabilities. The new release builds on the single application architecture that is the hallmark of MPC.
"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 organisations 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."
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 partial consolidations, for example, 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 organisation 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."
The new release also offers enhanced reporting capability that allows users to create sophisticated formalised reporting in whatever manner best suits the organisation, providing optimal flexbility in terms of both report content and formatting.
MPC 7 extends the current Excel Services functionality to deliver Excel cell-based reporting capabilities so that users can leverage the data in the centralised application without giving up the flexibility. It also offers simplified ERP integration.
Geac MPC 7 supports Oracle and SQL Server databases, and works with Microsoft Reporting and Analysis Services.
