Acorn Software Solutions: Targeted Applications
Emerging market trends and initiatives have created increasing customer demand for targeted solutions. Targeted applications narrowly focus on a specific industry and/or business initiative, and include additional analytic, simulation, and/or UI capabilities.
Business users rely heavily on targeted application output to make daily, fact-based decisions. This enables operational and financial managers to make decisions that increase revenue, decrease costs and improve operational efficiency. For this reason, Acorn Systems will continue to develop targeted applications that are consistent with Acorn’s core values - low total cost of ownership, minimal implementation effort and quick time to value.
Applications
• Industry Value Accelerators
• Supply Chain Analyzer
• IT Value Management
• Price Analyzer
Industry Value Accelerators
Acorn Systems has focused on profitability and cost management by industry vertical for over twelve years. Industry Value Accelerators harness best practices and the profit improvement realized by clients since Acorn’s beginnings.
These industry-specific applications contain
• Template model structures
• Business rules
• Data requests
• Integration steps
• Packaged reporting
The result is an "out of the box" solution that provides a profit improvement roadmap. This enables rapid deployment so you can quickly identify profit improvement opportunities. It is easy to identify unforeseen profit and cost initiatives.
[ Back to top ]
Supply Chain Analyzer
Acorn Supply Chain Analyzer is the only enterprise modeling and simulation tool on the market that allows you to analyze the total supply chain cost, trade-deal funding, and net profit of any product through any flow path. This enables cost-effective supply chain decisions.
Supply Chain Analyzer links fact-based cost analysis with supply chain flow path modeling and simulation to
• Reduce 3-5% of your current supply chain costs – make proactive rather than reactive decisions
• Monetize your supply chain - negotiate and change supplier / customer-driven behaviors
• Decrease working capital – minimize inventory, maximize accounts payable terms, and improve supply chain cash flow
It is an invaluable solution for consumer products, manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies.
[ Back to top ]
IT Value Management
IT costs are increasing. How can CIOs run their operations more like a business and stop IT costs from spiraling out of control? For the most part, IT cost allocations have been simple rather than accurate. Simplistic allocations based on “averages” over-charge the frugal and under-charge the frivolous.
Acorn’s IT Value Management solution provides the cost transparency IT business users need to understand and better manage their IT costs. It includes business modeling, cost calculations and trace-back transparency for companies using IT/shared services methodologies to distribute costs to internal and external customers. This solution delivers the scalability, transparency, turnaround, accuracy, and automation that demanding IT executives and their business customers require so that they can increase service and effectiveness while minimizing costs.
• IT Value Management helps organizations manage their consumption of IT resources because allocations are simple, fair, predictable, and controllable.
• The most robust IT Value Management implementations trust Acorn's bottoms-up, time-driven activity-based costing engine to more precisely drive costs to products and business units.
Whether your organization is calculating unit costs in spreadsheets or implementing activity- based costing for detailed usage-based allocation, Acorn has an IT cost allocation and IT chargeback solution that fits your needs.
The Solution includes
• Rate-based or usage-based cost calculations, using a consumption-driven model that works with: cost allocations, activity-based costing, time-driven activity-based costing
• Data integration and data capture
• Web-based reporting with robust drill-down for IT and business units
• Invoice and cost analysis reports
Forward thinking IT organizations approach IT chargeback as a journey to provide cost transparency to their internal clients. Only Acorn offers a solution that takes you from the simple to the complex without interruption.
[ Back to top ]
Price Analyzer
Price Analyzer provides deep price analytics for customers, customer segments, and products. It has more out-of-the-box reporting and analytics for pricing than is included in the Performance Analyzer™ application.
• Price Analyzer delivers waterfall, price band, and stacked performance charts to make monitoring price concessions, segment qualifications and discounts easier
• The same profit and capacity information that makes Acorn Performance Analyzer® so powerful also drives Price Analyzer, ensuring that organizations use financially and operationally validated data to drive essential pricing decisions
• Acorn displays this data via the Acorn business portal, providing at-a-glance identification of outliers, with targeted drill-down reports that arm decision makers with the information necessary to take action
• Price strategists have the option of running what-ifs, changing underlying assumptions to see the results, or re-segmenting customers and products on the fly to see how the cost-to-serve their categories changes
[ Back to top ]
|