Axiom Software by Syntellis Performance Solutions vs. PowerPlan

Axiom is extremely well suited to optimize the Budget process. Using Axiom, we have cut our overall budget cycle time in half and have a much higher level of accuracy in all facets of the Budget including Fee Income, Expense, and Margin. Axiom is also well suited for advanced data users as you have the ability to create your own custom database tables which allows you to join to the existing Axiom tables and has allowed us to create custom reporting that we could not even think about on our previous system. The other big benefit of Axiom is that it sits on top of Microsoft Excel and inherits all of its functionality, which most people have experience with.

Incentivized

[PowerPlan is well suited for] Any Utility who handles their own Fixed Asset Accounting and Reporting. There are very few specialized solutions in this space that can handle this out of the box. Core functionality and support with PowerPlan are excellent. If you have a firm or service that handles a portion or the majority of your Fixed Asset Accounting and Reporting than this solution is overkill and costly for what you need. There may be other options also if you have a robust internal technology team that is comfortable developing another major fixed asset solution into what you need. Cloud Hosting is also not available at this time and will likely be several releases out and be a major redesign (unstable) at first.

Incentivized

• Compared to a previous EPM we used, Axiom's template load and saving performance has been much better even for large plan files.
• Axiom consultants can create completely customized reports for any of the collected data. Super users within your organization can then fairly easily modify their work to create additional reports without Axiom's help (and invoices)
• Setting up user security is a fairly easy one-time task and very easy to maintain when people change departments, leave the organization, etc. I would recommend you use role-based security settings.
• Compared to our previous EPM, Axiom allows more customization and possibilities for templates. There's very few "the product can't do that" statements.

Incentivized

• Allow the use of retirement units for unitization out of the box.
• Align with Ferc Account and Reporting Standards
• Provide Dashboards that can be configured for different users or groups
• Functions well in a Project Centric Accounting Environment.

Incentivized

• Implementation is quite Complex and requires both IT and Financial buy-in
• Reporting solution has some learning curve for end users
• Calculation methods within reporting can be opaque and hard to trace

Incentivized

• The backend technology is dated and requires specialized skills or PowerPlan assistance to develop on.
• UI is also outdated and not as visually appealing as users are now accustomed to.
• Reporting is basic in functionality and appearance.

Incentivized

For the scale of our implementation, Axiom only assigned two consultants who were both completely new to the company. It felt like we were all learning about the product together, when you would expect them to already be experts at their own product. The team also made a good bit of mistakes throughout production and go-live, which then caused more work internally for us. The team lead for our project also just left the company, so we'll see how next year's planning goes

Incentivized

Axiom was selected based on the impression of ease of use and integration. It is capable of holding all of our entities data while giving us an easier more accessible way to deliver monthly Financials and reports to managers. Then in costing we signed up because the impression of budgeting.

Incentivized

Oracle Financials (E-Business Suite) is a very Robust ERP solution that has better integration, reporting and functionality than PowerPlan. It also operates on a more Robust Technology Stack. The Fixed Assets Module is a great solution but lacks support for Utility Specific features and functionality, so much so that we chose PowerPlan to take over this specific functionality while still utilizing Oracle for the Majority of our Project and other Accounting Functions.

Incentivized

• Forecasting has improved
• Complexity of analysis has improved as well
• Our main data has been confused as we started using Axiom

• Better Fixed Asset Reporting to Provide to Rate Commissions.
• Allowed us to embark on a major Unitization initiative and re-design of our retirement catalog.
• Focus the Support team on other technologies due to the stable nature and good vendor support.

Incentivized