Frontline Systems Analytic Solver is an Excel add-on for performing data mining, and predictive analytics from within Microsoft Excel.
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Prophix
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, is used to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making within a harmonized user experience. To reduce complexity and uncertainty, the software offers automated insights and planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and consolidation functionalities.
Based on my limited experience and use, and therefore limited global knowledge of the software, I would recommend it especially if the data that will be used as inputs to the model has previously worked on a spreadsheet such as Excel. I would also recommend it to analyze problems of medium and small size. Given the experience I have had when I have used it with large problems, there have been noticeable decreases in the speed of response (which are not associated with the size of the system of equations involved in the calculation). Excellent for processing linear programming models.
If the budgeting is done with Excel spreadsheets, and your company is small to medium in size, Prophix is the system for you! Additionally, if your company is also doing monthly forecasting in Excel, Prophix will save you time and reduce errors. There are also many other worthwhile features, such as Account Reconciliation and consolidations.
Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.
On the few occasions when I have used it to deal with problems of optimization of relatively large parameters (with a large number of restrictions and decision variables), the program has been slower, not substantially but slower, than programs such as the WinQsb, even when the latter runs on 32-bit machines and not 64. That has caught my attention, even though it is not a real problem for the uses I give to the program.
Given my partial function as a university professor, it has been much more effective and practical to use other software, due to the limited options that the educational license associated with the software has.
Prophix could improve on its dashboarding capability - it is very basic and we always present our graphs/visuals in Excel.
We would love it if Prophix could improve its line item detail reports. They are not great right after downloading and require a lot of manipulation in Excel.
It would be awesome if we could fully integrate our invoicing software with Prophix. This would allow us to view invoices within Prophix rather than having to go into another tool.
The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments
I have used other reporting software over the years and so far this has been the simplest to set up, the most flexible to use and we have not yet used Prophix to its full capacity. Over the next year or so I can see us extending our use of Prophix to include any number of other functions.
The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.
Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.
The Prophix staff is very helpful and quick to respond. I like that they teach me instead of doing it for me when possible, so I don't have to contact them as often! Never talked to anyone at Prophix that I didn't respect or think highly of! Very professional, great customer service!
Training is essential for this software to be successful for any company. We unfortunately had a bad implementation and training manager so I can say with confidence that if we had the CSM we have now - we would be light years ahead of our knowledge of the system. I highly suggest taking all training opportunities and not rushing the implementation training
We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.
Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.
We believe in building the models in Excel. A limitation with Excel is that Excel Solver can not take more than 200 decision variables with multiple constraints. It is cheap in terms of license and maintenance fees against other softwares which are available in the market.
We felt Prophix was much more flexible than Briq and offered a more solid financial reporting and budgeting package. Briq is more custom built solution-focused. They build solutions to fit your specific needs. The primary reason we went with Prophix is that we wanted something we could tweak and design on our own after the initial build-out of the solution.
I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users
- It has allowed finding ways to optimize (minimizing costs or times) the field processes involved in various projects.
It has even allowed, in specific cases where it was used for that purpose, to optimize the allocation of resources (people) to work in different jobs that present weekly variations of the activity that these people must perform.
It has allowed the sensitivity analysis of projects to changes in the decision variables related to them, which, and in very dynamic and changing environments, resulted in substantial decreases in money losses.
Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.
