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Acorn Technology: Key Features & Benefits
Acorn Systems
provides high-quality, accurate, role-based business analytics to key
decision makers within the company.
Acorn offers a fully scalable,
enterprise-class suite of products designed especially for large models
and enormous data sets.
Acorn's advanced technology
empowers decision makers with custom dashboards, role-based reporting,
business scorecards, and quick time-to-value.
These key
features of Acorn's leading-edge technology help us deliver on our
promises.
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Role-Based Visualization
Dynamic Automation
Accurate and Verifiable
Sustainable, Scalable, and Secure
Flexible Integration
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Role-Based Visualization
Custom Dashboards
Acorn makes it easy to
combine corporate-wide reports, departmental lists, and individual charts
on the same dashboard. Role-based visualization is built into the Acorn
Business Dashboard and works with the Acorn security model. This allows
users to create customized views of the Acorn data as often as necessary,
and just as quickly revert to departmental or organizational views.
Role-Based Reporting
Acorn provides out-of-the-box,
report-level security to help ensure that every employee has the information
they need, while keeping sensitive information secure. You can secure
access to reports by individual or role for easy management of departmental
permissions.
Business Scorecards
Acorn interoperates with
the Microsoft Office Business Scorecards Manager 2005, enabling you
to include interactive business scorecards in the Acorn Business Dashboard.
The business scorecards
can be fed partially or wholly by the Acorn data, and the variety of
available visualizations ensures that each measure is represented logically
and usefully.
Dynamic
Automation
Quick
Time to Value
Acorn provides several
innovations to speed the time to ROI. -
- • Model templates
simplify the process of building a model, without sacrificing the customizations
your organization needs. These innovations range from model-building
to data import to value
capture.
- • When building your
model, the extensive self-validation within the Acorn Business Model
and a
suite of validation reports make it easy to verify that the flow
of cost in your model is accurate.
- • The Acorn Universal
Connector helps ensure that the data you bring into the Acorn Repository
is immediately useable by the Acorn calculation engine.
- • To help you quickly
get meaningful results from the Acorn data, Acorn provides the Value
Identification
Process and report that identify outliers and areas of improvement.
- • The Acorn Business
Dashboard provides continuous insight into your organization's performance.
The Dashboard also makes it easy to slice-and-dice data to identify
new opportunities for improvement.
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Low Total Cost of Ownership
Because Acorn provides
so many opportunities for automation in the model, significantly fewer
business analysts are necessary to maintain the model and produce results.
The self-service Acorn Business Dashboard reduces the reporting burden
on your business analysts, instead moving the responsibility for reporting
and dashboarding to the business end-users, where it belongs.
Easy Maintenance
Acorn provides over a dozen
built-in dimensions that can be used by the Acorn Advanced Analytics tool to automatically
build validation and profit cubes. The insight created by Acorn can
also be used in third-party OLAP and business scorecard tools for other
initiatives.
Your business analysts
never need to create or maintain dimensions. The Acorn model manages
them automatically as part of your model, and automatically updates
them every time you add or remove elements of the model. There are no
limits on the number or type of cost objects, drivers, or KPIs in the
Acorn model.
Accurate and Verifiable
Three-Way Validation
Our accuracy is achieved
by reconciling revenue, cost, and capacity both financially and operationally.
No other Profit Improvement vendor can say the same.
Acorn's automatic approach
to distributing cost within your organization translates into fewer
business analysts necessary to maintain the model, and fewer entry points
for error. The full validation of the Acorn data also assists in compliance
efforts, enabling you to demonstrate that financial data matches operational
numbers.
Full Traceback of Costs
The Acorn approach is the
only one that completely eliminates the need for subjective surveys
and percentage allocations.
The key is modeling your
organization as a provider of resources, whether they are measured in
time, machine instructions, weight, or other measures. In addition to
driving costs more accurately, the model will provide detailed capacity
utilization results so that you can better understand the patterns of
resource utilization, anticipate changes, and optimize your existing
resources.
Completely Auditable
Acorn's patented approach
to costing and our three-way validation mean that there are fewer "cooks
in the kitchen" working on your Acorn model. This translates into
fewer opportunities for error, and easier demonstration that the financial
and operational data match.
Acorn also provides element-level
security, complete audit trails of all model changes, and integration
with Single-Sign On security. This locks down model changes to only
authorized users and provides complete traceability to the source of
all changes.
Sustainable, Scalable
and Secure
Easy to Sustain
Acorn technology recognizes
and embraces the complexity of the largest enterprises. It has been
designed with the flexibility to effectively model your business processes
in a manner that is easy to change as your business processes change.
Highly Scalable
Acorn products are engineered
to process large enterprise-wide volumes within a single model.
Our solution is capable
of calculating the cost and profitability of millions of transactions
across all dimensions of your business. This scalability extends both
organizationally (e.g. across multiple stores, branches, divisions)
and across all assets (e.g. clients, products, channels, customer segments,
transactions).
By leveraging the latest
technology and industry-recognized best practices, Acorn's unparalleled
calculation and reporting performance allows for a continuous view of
performance for all aspects of your business.
Secure
Acorn EPS security is built
around the concept of users and roles. Users are members with one or
more roles. Roles are associated with the rights required to perform
certain functions within the product. Groups can be given permission
to view and/or edit specific model elements, and within Acorn reports,
groups can be given permission to run reports, create report templates,
and view specific report folders.
Clients can maintain users
and roles either entirely within the product, leverage the Microsoft
Windows 2000 Domain environment, import users and groups from one or
more LDAP directories, or use Single Sign On security. Every element
in the Acorn model can be secured and all model and facility security
settings can be handled in a single place.
Access to the Acorn suite
is controlled in one of four ways, in ascending order of security: SQL
Server security, Windows NT authentication, LDAP authentication, trusted
authentication, or SSO authentication. The method chosen can be easily
changed if necessary, requiring only a restart of the system to take
effect.
Flexible
IntegrationBecause the Acorn platform
is open architecture, clients can use Acorn's documented schema to integrate
Acorn data into third-party business intelligence tools.
Microsoft Components
The Acorn Business Portal is fully interoperable with the Microsoft
Office Solution Accelerators and ProClarity cubes and charts.
The workflows and data
that drive your Balanced Scorecard and budgeting initiatives can contribute
to the analysis available in the Acorn Business Portal - and vice versa.
The free Microsoft Office Web Components can also run against the Acorn
cubes to create dynamic content for the dashboard.
Other
Third-Party Tools
Acorn has integrated with hundreds of different ERP, G/L, transaction
systems and reporting solutions.
These have included exports
to Oracle OFA, Hyperion Essbase, AS400 DB2 databases, etc. For outbound
ETL, Acorn uses standard ETL push or pull scenarios. Acorn most often
uses MS SSIS since it is flexible, graphical, and scalable and is packaged
with Microsoft SQL Server at no additional cost. Acorn provides a variety
of database views to facilitate this process.
The Acorn database is structured
so that each time period's data is stored separately, resulting in easy
publication of incremental data to external systems.
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Using Acorns software made us realize that there are opportunities not only with the unprofitable customers, but with profitable customers
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- Ed Gaio, CFO
Pioneer-Standard Electronics
Enterprise Performance Suite
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