Jedox is a Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management solution. According to the vendor, their solution’s unified planning, analysis and reporting empowers decision makers from finance, sales, purchasing and marketing. Additionally, the vendor says this solution helps business users work smarter, streamline business collaboration, and make insight-based decisions with confidence. The vendor also says 1,900 organizations in 127 countries are using Jedox for real-time planning…
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Planful
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
Best suited for financial consolidation and / or as a highly customized and compact EPM / BI solution (up to 100 CCU) with individual workflows, planning and reporting functionalities, with moderate number of users (no restrictions for any industry, all industries are covered well). It also has advanced reporting & data analysis requirements and provides an integration and reporting layer of imported data from different external systems (via ETL). It can help with migrating your legacy Excel-based business models to the Web. It is not well suited for Enterprise BI applications with expecting >500 CCU (users at the same time working with the system) - this may cause serious performance issues, as all data is kept in RAM. Jedox is also less suited for applications with heavy document management requirements (document management is not an out of the box functionality in Jedox and rather requires custom development through custom widgets etc.).
Scenarios where it would be well-suited: - Creating actual versus planned dashboards for budgetary and FP&A purposes - Exporting or creating reports to examine vendor details, KPIs by a certain parameter, etc. Scenarios where it is less appropriate: - Creating very very intricate charts and graphs - I use Tableau for this if I want to easily interact with charts and tables - Linking it to a database and making it more "alive" - for instance, in Tableau, I connect that to a database. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I could do this with Planful.
Diversity. Jedox can be applied to many different use cases from small to large deployments and from budgeting to enterprise class BI solutions. But rarely is one tool able to fulfill all of these requirements in one organisation. This value proposition can be complicated for prospective users.
Awareness. Jedox punches above its weight in capability and scalability, but not enough people have heard about it and therefore procurement processes can be drawn out as a result.
User security control could be more centralized on the platform, where you may need to navigate to multiple screens to ensure the access granted is what it should be, depending on your system setup.
Dynamic planning (while certainly powerful and can help fulfill special use cases) does have more of a learning curve vs. other areas of Planful, especially if you are not using it frequently. That being said, Planful does have training and resources to help acquire that knowledge.
Out-of-the-box intercompany reporting in the consolidation module can be tricky depending on how balances are booked in local source systems. Building reports using the intercompany dimension can be challenging depending on your specific company (entity) structure, but it can be done with some testing and validation.
Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
To me Jedox deserves 10/10 because it is a consistent one-in-all platform with a modern look and feel. It is intuitive to use and allows you to make intuitive applications integrating traditional business intelligence with performance management functionality. It certainly has a short learning curve, especially for those that are familiar with MS Excel. An example: I've lost count but Jedox it is available in more than 25 languages. Another: Jedox does not require programming skills... it is developed to be used by the business.
Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
Jedox has very few bugs. Reports are available through an Excel add-in, the web and/or mobile device (IOS/Android). In my opinion, availability also means high performance, not having to wait for the system to give you the required reports, analysis, dashboards instantly.
I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
Jedox support in general is a professional and fast responding team. An easy-to-use ticketing system is in place. Bug-related questions are solved fast (responses come usually in a few hours after the question), but some questions / tickets, that are not Jedox-related bugs (for example some advanced questions about Jedox functionality), may be forwarded to Application Management team for further processing and then it may take several days or even weeks to get a response here -> there is room for improvement here.
Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
I have made a point to attend the Planful Perform conference and it, by far, offers so much more information than "other conferences". Planful does an amazing job including their customers (other users) in their conference to ensure their customers are getting the most out of the information provided. It is truly a wonderful LEARNING experience for their customers!
A few years ago I participated in a lot of their online learning. Their references have grown over the years and continue to get better and better. We use it throughout the year to update the information we hold internally for documentation and to educate ourselves on all of the new release notes and features within Planful.
The implementation of SSO, SAML Authentication, HTTPS, Server splitting (Frontend / Backend servers) could be more standardized and made more user friendly to set up (e.g. via setup guide). Otherwise the implementation of Jedox is quick and simple when compared to other similar technologies.
After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.
Calumo is similar product to Jedox. I have used it extensively in my previous role. It was a major contender when we evaluated a BI platform for NIDA. Calumo is a great product as well and it was a very close call. Where we found Jedox to be a better fit for NIDA was the ability to prepare dynamic reports with ease without the need to learn MDX which was used extensively by Calumo to make dynamic reports which expand or shrink based on the underlying data. Another major benefit we saw in Jedox was the whole ETL process could be managed within Jedox instead of doing it in SQL server which negates having a dedicated SQL specialist role when the scale expands.
Planful is nice for the reporting option. SAP Concur doesn't so much have an option where you can see physical reports. You can easily report on the tool and send reimbursement requests and such, but you have to use multiple tools if you use Concur and want to see any sort of account history and/or detailed report information.
Scalability is often another word for speed. Given enough data, enough users or enough calculations, the tool becomes slower and slower. You will find that Jedox has a very high performance that can even be increased by the use of grafical cards. Other thaen that it does not only offer BI (looking back based on historical ERP data) but also allows you to look forward through integrated budgetting, planning, forecasting, workflow and collaboration. Not easy to find a tool that can support so much business functionality. So, also pretty scalable in that respect.
I give this rating simply because I have first-hand knowledge of the scalability of Planful when working across departments in our company that use different financial systems. We have one team on InEight and another using SAP. When we implemented it, we only customized the system to accommodate one of these financial platforms, but when we considered expanding the use of Planful to other departments, we were able to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate our needs.
Financial budgeting and Forecasting are done in a centralized fashion in Jedox now instead of a decentralized excel based approach. A lot of cost savings and improved reliability
Easy to use self-help Dashboards and detailed reports
We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report.
Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year
With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily
