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Acorn solutions for Microsoft customers
Acorn is a Microsoft US Managed ISV and Gold Certified Partner. We provide world-class costing and profitability solutions that complement Microsoft’s business intelligence and performance management products and leverage the superior price/ performance of its SQL Server and Windows Server platform.
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"Acorn Systems' solution gives us even greater visibility into the profitability of our individual stores and products we sell. Acorn's ability to bring expertise in retail and activity-based costing was critical to a successful implementation, and the Microsoft-based solution has been able to scale to meet the needs of our fast-paced retail environment."
Steve Stone, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Lowe’s
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You too can enjoy the best of both worlds: strong database/data warehouse, business intelligence, and software applications from Microsoft, and the world’s leading performance measurement solutions from Acorn – integrated, automated, and proven. Yes, it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too. Acorn leverages the "Microsoft-stack" to deliver our best-of-breed solution to you. A partial list of marquee Microsoft customers who chose Acorn for their profit improvement includes: Lowe’s, Union Bank of California and Firstrust.
How does Acorn’s solution fit into your Microsoft environment?
How do we make it easy and cost effective to leverage your investment in Microsoft?
How is Acorn’s solution superior to other Microsoft-based alternatives for costing and profitability?
How does Acorn’s solution fit into your Microsoft environment?
If you are like most Microsoft customers, you have a variety of core Microsoft solutions, including:
• SharePoint Server 2007
• SQL Server Database
• Performance Point
• Microsoft Office applications
• Rich BI and analytic solutions
• Microsoft Operating System(s)
• A variety of other Microsoft applications
A variety of other vendors’ platforms which together comprise your global ERP, financials, core and departmental applications, and data/IT infrastructure
You are not alone. Acorn’s solution works with, and is agnostic to, the variety of source data systems, applications (ERP, financials, CRM, SCM, etc.), data warehouses/databases, and business intelligence platforms you have.
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How do we make it easy and cost effective to leverage your investment in Microsoft?
1. Data in: We leverage critical data from your Microsoft applications and/or Microsoft data warehouse into Acorn via automated extraction, transformation and load routines that "feed" Acorn. To make it simple to install and automated, we provide a packaged utility called the Acorn Universal Connector that makes it easy to get data into Acorn for cost and profit calculations. This utility is packaged with our core platform applications, and is based on functionality provided in the Microsoft SQL solution.
2. Acorn’s solution creates new insight into the revenue, cost, net profit and resource capacity utilization of any dimension of your business in a unified model.
3. Insight/data out: After Acorn calculates your new performance management insight, you can leverage your existing Microsoft data warehouse and BI platforms of choice – preserving your investment, training and user adoption of these offerings. Think about it this way. New insight created by Acorn enhances and "feeds" the repository of data already contained in your data warehouse. You can also leverage your rich Acorn insight with Microsoft’s BI solutions including Microsoft Reporting Services, SharePoint, and Analysis Services. We make it easy and automated to use your Microsoft BI / Performance Point offering for advanced analytics with our packaged solution: Acorn’s Advanced Analytics and the Advanced Analytics Connector for Microsoft.
4. Do you want a "closed loop" solution? You can run your budgets, plans, and forecasts through your Acorn model to determine the cost, profitability, and resource capacity necessary for your plans. Leverage the rich driver information created by Acorn with your Performance Point solutions, including budgeting, planning and forecasting. That’s the power of the integration between Acorn and your Performance Point solutions.
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How is Acorn’s solution superior to other Microsoft-based alternatives for costing and profitability?
As validated by Gartner, PerformancePoint Server lacks packaged capabilities. Microsoft and its clients turn to Acorn for this element of a total performance management solution.
Microsoft Excel and Access are great tools to build "sandbox" prototypes and simplistic cost and profit models, but they are not designed to provide the enterprise scale, modeling complexity, or accuracy of Acorn’s best-of-breed solution.
Why is Acorn’s Microsoft-based offering superior to the spreadsheet and Access build-it-from-scratch approach?
1. Excel and Access do not enable you to perform "bottoms-up" or transaction level costing and profitability analysis. You are forced to perform a "top-down" approach for costing and profitability. Excel and Access can’t scale to your enterprise at a granular level of analysis. If you want transaction, order, account, customer, or product level analysis, spreadsheets and Access can’t help – Acorn can.
2. Excel and Access do not provide an unlimited number of dimensions for costing and profitability analysis in a single unified model – such as account, customer, customer segment, channel, and organization. You are limited to a few dimensions, and that limits your ability to drive profit improvement via root cause analysis and insight.
3. Excel and Access were not architected to deliver the time-driven ABC (TDABC) methodology. Acorn’s solution was architected to accommodate a wide variety of methodologies including TDABC, a methodology we invented and wrote the book on.
4. Excel and Access are not fully automated end to end (IT load calculate results/ reporting) – our solution is. Even if your IT folks love Microsoft data base tools, they don’t love manual intervention requirements for any application. Acorn’s application is automated end to end, from data load – to calculate – to results. It leverages the power of Acorn’s Universal Connector and proven Profit Path Methodology™ – providing IT the freedom that automation delivers.
5. Microsoft does not have the depth/breath of world-class experts in costing and profitability that Acorn does. In fact, no company does. For you, success is as much about your partners’ expertise, proven methodologies, and best practices as it is the technology. Talk to the Acorn profit experts to experience the difference.
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