Offline Functionality Simplifies Data Entry for 500 Users Worldwide

PROPHIX Software is a leader in delivering performance management solutions including budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, personnel planning and other advanced financial functions. PROPHIX streamlines business processes, and Kemira Chemicals, a global chemical manufacturing company headquartered in Finland, proves the application’s capabilities. With approximately 10,000 employees in 1700 cost centers, Kemira operates in the following businesses: Water Treatment Chemicals, Pulp & Paper Chemicals, and Oil & Mining Chemicals. The company’s technical infrastructure consisted of Hyperion Financial Manager for corporate reporting and Excel spreadsheets for budget data entry. A sudden decision to halt a current SAP project left Kemira seeking a budgeting system to implement quickly. Being a global company operating in 40 countries and 8 currencies, Kemira needed an easy-to-use system that handled multiple currencies, complex allocations, and data consolidation.

PROPHIX Performance Management fulfilled Kemira’s requirements and also offered a capability that would simplify their processes. PROPHIX’s offline data entry functions allowed the ability to send templates via e-mail, track the status, and automatically load template data when completed. “Because we needed to collect budget data in a standard format from over 500 users located throughout the world, the offline functionality was a major tool for us,” says Jeff Fasy, former CFO at Kemira. “Because of its offline capabilities, PROPHIX was implemented to collect, analyze, and report Cost Center, Intercompany, Profit & Loss, and Balance Sheet data.”

With PROPHIX, Kemira gained the ability to automate currency conversion, perform ad hoc reporting, and simplify report distribution. Kemira’s currency conversion process consists of converting to EUROs and USDs from various cost centers. By using templates, entering budget data is straightforward regardless of currency because exchange rates are kept separately, which can be changed easily during the budget cycle. “Additionally, we were able to quickly develop ad hoc reports to view expenses by legal entity. This helped us determine our course of action when budgeted expenses were higher than expected,” says Jeff. Consolidated data was then easily distributed. The report binder functionality was used to effectively distribute groups of reports to each country controller. Sending set groups of reports via e-mail ensured that stakeholders received information on time.

Kemira has gained more time for analysis because PROPHIX eliminated the need to manually load data, perform consolidations, and export final numbers to Hyperion Financial Manager. Ultimately, creating budgets in PROPHIX has integrated data across their Line of Business Systems, easing the collaboration across the global organization.

For more information on how PROPHIX can help your organization move beyond spreadsheets with real time access to information within weeks, please reach out to Kimberly Owens at 704-987-9989 or kowens@broadpoint.net. PROPHIX offers a significant return on investment and a low total cost of ownership.

On Demand FastPath Webinars due to popularity

By Nadia Isata, Account Manager, BroadPoint Technologies

BroadPoint will be conducting a second on demand FastPath webcast for select customers, since the first was extremely popular. This webcast will show how Fastpath Audit Trail offers superior performance and configurability. Within a few hours, you can quickly know what was

changed, who changed it and the before and after values.

* Tracks changes made from inside Dynamics and external sources

* Extensive list of audit trail templates

* Quick implementation and ROI

* Best available performance and reporting for Microsoft Dynamics

Fastpath Config AD moves all user management to the IT help desk and eliminates potential security conflicts by taking all user administration out of Dynamics.

* Eliminates use of 'sa' and Administrator for better security management

* Streamline new hire, termination, and user change management.

* Fastpath has the only single sign on product for Dynamics GP

* Decrease user maintenance costs by 65%

Sessions will be scheduled on demand.  If you would like to attend, please contact Nadia Isata at nisata@broadpoint.net or at (301) 634-2403.

What is PCI and Why is PCI Compliance important for you?

For more information contact Kim Owens, (704) 987-9989

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. Essentially any merchant that has a Merchant ID (MID).

Payment Card Industries (PCI) Security Standards Council members including Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, etc. continually monitor and fight payment card data theft. These compromises affect the full spectrum of merchants, from very small to very large organizations. A security breach of any sensitive data can lead to serious consequences, including:

• Potential heavy financial penalties (ie, regulation violation fees & fines)
• Loss of reputation
• Loss of customers
• Litigation
• Merchant Account Revoke

Being PCI Compliance ensures that a merchant has met rigid PCI security standards. In addition, Visa mandates that any custom requires integrated credit card processing applications, it must be PA-DSS certified credit card processing applications by Oct 1, 2009. (See attached Visa Mandate). This so-called phase IV is intended to eliminate the continued use of vulnerable payment applications by acquirers, merchants and agents within the payment system.

Understanding this mandates, companies should make sure that their credit card processing software provider for their Dynamics ERP has been validated to be in compliant with PA-DSS. Using a certified credit card processing software will definitely help merchants to meet all security standards requirements and can achieve PCI compliance easier.

(Optional) Learn more about the importance of PCI compliance. Join us for a specialized webinar session where we will walk you through PCI’s payment application mandates and show how BroadPoint and their partner Nodus can help you to meet PCI security standards requirements.

The Evolution of Paper

Kim Owens, Account Manager, BroadPoint Technologies

Humans first started documenting information on stone. Egyptians then created paper made from the reed of the Nile River. Thousands of years later, we are evolving away from our dependency on paper because of the time and the costs involved.

We have seen this evolution before with the introduction of computers to the workplace. They allowed offices to operation efficiently by eliminating mistakes caused by human error and reducing overhead costs because of time intensive tasks. We can now print out reports on demand which once took hours to produce. So why are we still spending hours performing manual tasks when it comes to managing our paper? Wouldn’t it be easier to manage the documents essential to our business electronically?

According to the October 9^th, 2009 issue of The Economist, the paperless office is finally a reality. In order to understand the reason for the push to paperless, let’s look at some staggering statistics:

• We spend 20-30% of our time each day is spent filing, search and retrieving information
• It costs $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document and $220 to replace a lost document
• The average document is copied 19 times in its live
• It costs $25,000 to fill a four drawer cabinet
• 1 out of 10 documents is lost or misfiled

How much money is pushing paper costing your company and how much is the technology to correct it? Just like the introduction of computers, new affordable technology is also driving the paperless revolution. Storage space on servers is inexpensive compared to 30 years ago and the costs of scanners have dropped significantly in the past decade. For example, you can store 400,000 documents on $80 of disk space compare to $75,000 in 1973.

Document Management and Electronic Workflow software doesn’t have to be expensive either. PaperSave delivers a seamlessly integrated solution with Dynamics built on SharePoint starting at only $5,000 for the first 3 users. So manage the information that drives your business, not the paper. To learn more on PaperSave and how affordable document imaging and electronic workflow is for your company, register for a webcast on July 16^th or July 30^th.

BroadPoint Partner Scribe announces Scribe Web Services Adapter Product Launch Webinar

Webcast: Scribe Web Services Adapter Product Launch: Overview and Demonstrations – Thursday, May 14 @ 11am – 12pm EST
This webcast will cover the newly released Web Services Adapter for Scribe Insight and Scribe Insight Enterprise. The webcast will include a feature overview and several demonstrations of the Web Service Adapter enabling integration to Dynamics AX, Microsoft SharePoint and 3rd party commercial web services. Click to read the Adapter for Web Services data sheet.

Scribe Presenters for the webcast will be:
Bob Sturim - Vice President, ProductsJohn Gravely - Vice President, Marketing and Product MarketingLou Antonucci - Vice President, Sales
Tomas O’Brien - Product Manager

Please register at the following registration URL https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8001615779/Registration.aspx?pageName=rx9xxrf8tbj9g3rz

E-Procurement as Counter-Cyclical

This is Brinton Baker and I lead marketing and business development for Paramount Technologies. We’re the leading global provider of Employee Workforce Automation software; we automate your procurement, project, time and expense transactions to deliver reduced transaction costs and enhanced process efficiencies that will streamline your employee management and procurement processes, improve your employee productivity and accelerate your business.

In this challenging economy everyone is trying to manage costs. Perhaps surprisingly then, we are seeing increased interest in e-procurement solutions. It’s not hard to figure out why. According to a leading industry analyst firm, e-procurement can:

• Achieve 5% - 10% price reductions through improved contract compliance
• Reduce order requisition costs from $114 per order to $31 on average
• Shorten purchase and fulfillment cycles from 8 days to 2 days
• Cut in half instances of maverick purchasing
• Lower inventory costs for indirect goods by 25% to 50%

The bottom line is that less money is wasted on inappropriate purchases and excess inventory, better prices can be negotiated, and employees are more productive. Just what businesses need these days.

How is this possible? Businesses typically spend between 50% and 80% of revenues on the procurement of external goods and services, so even small cost improvements can quickly yield significant bottom line benefits and create sustainable year-over-year cost reductions to support continued profitability and growth.

Paramount Technologies has proudly partnered with BroadPoint Technologies since 2004. If you would like to find out if e-procurement will help your business, or if you are currently using Dynamics GP Requisition Management and want to see how much more is possible, call BroadPoint to arrange for a personal demonstration.

Why Should Our Organization Invest in a Social Networking Tool When We Can Use Facebook for Free?

As you discover the new world of social media and social networking and evaluate whether it’s even good for your organization, you may be asking yourself this very question. Most organizations are very excited by the use of social networking tools and offering this powerful tool to their constituents, but most often ask the following questions:

1. Especially in these tough economic times, why would I invest in a social networking tool for my organization when I can offer it to them for free through facebook?

2. Will my constituents/customers use this tool? Our constituents are not in their 20’s….

Consider the following in your evaluation of social networking tools for your organization:

We think Facebook is a great tool for organizations to reach out to large numbers of potential new members/customers, and encourage organizations to consider using Facebook for that purpose. Then, once users are interested in the organization, they should be redirected to join the organization’s own Social Networking community site.

Facebook is a purely social networking site, and was not designed or intended to be an organizational or business environment. The Facebook groups functionality is really designed primarily to let friends touch base with one another. It’s terrific for that! But, it’s lacking most of the collaboration and communication tools included with more professional social networking applications that are so valuable to an organization and its members/customers. With Facebook:
• There’s no bridge to your internal database. So, no single sign on; no coordination of profile information; and no linking of groups.
• The users are on Facebook’s website. They’re not within the organization’s website environment.
• The organization may not even get credit in the eyes of the participants, because anyone could set up a Facebook group for that organization’s constituents.
• There is no email listserv (probably the most-used feature of professional social networking tools).
• There’s no library for sharing documents (other than photos and videos).
• There’s no wiki for collaborating together on a document.
• There are no administrative reports or administrative controls.
• The discussion board allows nothing but plain text, instead of the feature-rich WYSYIWYG editor and the ability to embed images and attach documents that professional social networking tools provide.
• There are no personal or group blogs.
• There is no search capability—an almost fatal lack for any real business use. How can participants use it to share knowledge effectively if they have no way to find that knowledge?
• There is no flexibility of set up (as compared to the hundreds of configuration options in professional social networking applications).
• And, finally, there’s no real branding for the organization other than a logo.

All of those features are included in a professional Social Networking application and more.

Another very important differentiator is the treatment of data and privacy. The data in Facebook is subject to Facebook’s terms of service which give it much more control than a business organization would want. Facebook just recently tried to assert that they owned all of the content created or uploaded by users, and could use it for any purpose they wanted! That effort was beaten back, but there’s no certainty that they won’t find some other way to use users’ data.

In addressing the concern as to whether your constituents (especially those over the age of 20) will use a professional social networking tool offered by your organization, consider the following information reported by GuideStar and gathered through a Deloitte survey:

Social media is here to stay. A survey by Deloitte reported that 43 percent of Internet users over the age of 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. Some 36 percent watched and read personal content created by others. And surprise: the average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male with an average annual income of nearly $56,000. For organizations, that profile is prime for targeting as a potential customer, member, or donor.