Acorn Advanced Analytics™ (AAA)

Acorn Advanced Analytics is an easy-to-use, menu-driven application that links Acorn’s calculated results to a company’s business intelligence (BI) infrastructure. Multidimensional results are readily available via drop-down menus and are configured to meet your reporting needs. AAA is designed to work with any Acorn cost or profitability model and uses Acorn metadata to determine the reporting structure, dimensions, hierarchies and measures. By reading the dimensional data (drivers and results that have already been extracted, transformed and loaded into the Acorn repository), AAA can save weeks to months over traditional build-it-yourself BI custom implementations.

AAA can be leveraged to generate OLAP cubes for your preferred BI platform (Microsoft, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle Hyperion, or others). The resulting multidimensional data source is available to any BI reporting solution that can read a defined fact table.

Acorn Advanced Analytics Technical Brief

Acorn Power Components for Excel™ (APC)

Acorn Power Components for Excel empowers end-users to leverage Microsoft Excel functionality and familiarity for model maintenance and reporting. These capabilities leverage enhanced Excel 2007 and 2010 functionality, allowing the user to use the new features and functions such as charting and equations.

Three components:

• Power Modeler for Excel – Use the Excel interface to easily build and maintain model structure and components
• Data Connector for Excel – Retrieve, update, and input time period data in bulk
• Power Reporting for Excel – Retrieve calculated model results in Excel Spreadsheet format, then utilize Excel functions to report the output

Acorn Power Components for Excel Technical Brief

Model Change Management™ (MCM)

Acorn's Model Change Management (MCM) facilitates the process of making small- or large-scale changes to your model through an external interface. MCM is often used by Acorn customers to manage multiple environments in an efficient manner and propagate changes without manually replicating data and model entry through the standard application interface.

Configure MCM to reference different models on the same or different environments to review additions, modifications and deletions between two Performance Analyzer™ (PA) or Cost Analyzer™ (CA) models, and select the changes to promote from the source to target model. MCM easily and effectively manages the continuity between any two environments, and is perfect for development, testing, and production tiered deployments.

Model Change Management Technical Brief

Acorn Universal Connector™ (AUC)

Acorn Universal Connector allows users to import data from various disparate sources into system generated staging tables reflecting your Enterprise Performance Suite Model (EPS). Predefined and structured staging tables are automatically generated from the EPS Application upon model completion. General ledger, department drivers, and cost object instances are automatically loaded upon model execution. AUC monitors ongoing changes to the Acorn model and subsequently updates all staging tables’ schemas to ensure consistent table design. AUC also includes over 16 best practice validation scripts and is easily customer defined. Validation script examples include but are not limited to null values, general ledger facility location checks, general ledger account types, duplicate department driver names, and cost object structure relationships.

 Acorn Universal Connector Technical Brief