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Companies have invested and continue to invest in master data management (MDM) in
order to rationalize and allow re-use of business domains (customers, products,
channels, etc.) What BPM Architect is providing is a studio-like environment for
centralized development and deployment of Financial Management, Planning, and
Essbase reporting applications. (The Essbase applications were characterized to
me as reporting applications, while the Planning and Financial Management
applications aren't just for reporting purposes.) Maybe this is Master Application
Management" (my own analogy). It surfaces libraries of dimensions and applications,
from which new applications can be spun. Included (as with MDM) is the ability to
subset dimensions so that different apps see their own relevant portion of the
overall master data. Since applications maintain their own data storage, data
synchronization jobs can be defined as well, and it maintains libraries of these
as well.
Basically, at least most of the tasks of defining and maintaining
an app that are separate from the calculation logic portion are covered in
the software shown in the BPM Architect station. Together with the Calculation
Manager (which will fit in as a component of the BPM Architect),
developing and maintaining apps across consolidation, planning and
Essbase will get a lot easier.
The business case for this is consistent interpretations of data,
increased productivity, decreased cost of application development.
That seems pretty worthwhile.
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