Prophix brings Power to the User
Updated January 23, 2016
Prophix brings Power to the User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Prophix 11 SP4 (11.5.128.0)
Modules Used
- Performance Management
Overall Satisfaction with Prophix
Prophix is used by our company to create business organization and version models for planning and forecasting. The entire financial organization and upper management depends on the Data and Template views to the Financial Cube for comparison to imported general ledger actual in monthly financial reporting and analytics. Analysts use Prophix for data mining and analysis. Accountants use it for reconciliation and validation.
Data integrity was a serious issue before Prophix. Significant time was wasted monthly reconciling various versions of the financials and maintaining report definition. Implementation of Prophix forced a fresh start using a streamlined set of template reports; drawing data from a single Financial cube for near flawless integrity. I never worry that the amount for a given Dimension member combination will not match from report to report.
Data integrity was a serious issue before Prophix. Significant time was wasted monthly reconciling various versions of the financials and maintaining report definition. Implementation of Prophix forced a fresh start using a streamlined set of template reports; drawing data from a single Financial cube for near flawless integrity. I never worry that the amount for a given Dimension member combination will not match from report to report.
- Organization dimension modeling is a simple and visual drag and drop.
- All displayed data comes from one source (of the truth). The same measure will match from report to report with integrity.
- Ad Hoc analysis on Dimension hierarchies and amounts for the member combinations facilitates data mining and analysis.
- Detail Planning Modules posted directly to the Financial Cube gives seamless Drill Through to detail of Plan and Forecast.
- Delta Analysis tools are an attractive way to enter data within the model and without Excel hell.
- Smart Monitor makes available meaningful balanced score card dashboards; with performance parameters controlled by the business owner.
- Drill Across to transaction detail is dependent on the customer's technical ability and capacity to export from ERP to tables. Prophix Consulting should invest in an expertise and service offering to make Drill Across work by fetching transactions directly from the ERP tables themselves. We have a wide user group that views Drill Across Journal Line detail, but must move into inadequate ERP functionality in order to see further into transactions.
- There should be what if Organization hierarchies for Planning and Forecasting (Alternate Hierarchies based on update of individual member properties is too hard to maintain) .
- Work Flow Activities and underlying Tasks should be movable by drag and drop and the Task due dates should, optionally be set as business days before or after the start of the month. Without that the due dates are requiring review and refinement each month to allow for weekend and holidays.
- Rolling 12 month Time Perspective member should come standard.
- Prophix Consulting has advised that a combination of sales by product and customer is just too much to handle. This is an important dimension combination not to have in the model.
- Required administrative attention to data integrity has improved to eliminate one contractor and redistributed full time administration to more value added activities.
- Dimension hierarchy and member selection changes are fast, reducing decision makers wait time for presentation, allowing for more what if.
- Forward thinking plan and forecast activities come first in modeling, with historical actual brought in for comparison and management reporting.
Prophix modeling is more flexible and customer support is more responsive. End users are empowered with ease of functionality that is lacking in the bigger brands. Design is more attentive to user feedback.
Prophix Feature Ratings
Using Prophix
37 - Financial Planning & Analysis and Accounting
1 - Accounting and Financial Reporting skills enhance the Model Administration knowledge
- Annual Planning
- Monthly Forecasting
- Consolidating Management Reporting
- Consolidating Legal Entity Reporting
- Easy commonly available source of account and organization dimension member information and their hierarchies
- KPI collections
- Calculated version members for consistent variance analysis and presentation
- Detail employee planning
- Product sales and profitability
- Dash-boarding with Balanced Score Cards of KPI collection types
- Migration from disconnected spreadsheet analysis for driver based planning and foreacasting
Evaluating Prophix and Competitors
Yes - Oracle EBS General Ledger was the repository for spreadsheet sourced Budget and Forecast; and Oracle Financial Statement Generator used for the Monthly Operating Review. Spreadsheet uploads and report definition maintenance was cumbersome and data integrity low, in large part to previous mistakes made in Oracle EBS use. Prophix gave us a fresh start with a common platform for Budgeting and Forecasting; with easy import of Actual form Oracle GL for the Monthly Operating Review.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Third-party Reviews
Prophix functionality was comparable to that anticipated with Oracle Hyperion Planning and Business Intelligence and at a third the cost. The Gartner Magic Quadrant report comparing value of similar products supported our decision.
Provide Prophix with more precise Dimension and Member numbers for each cube to know in advance if expectations of capacity exceed reality. Press for more specificity on the Drill Across feature to know, up front that a seamless link to Oracle EBS transactional detail table data is not within Prophix expertise.
Prophix Implementation
- Vendor implemented
Yes - Financial cube followed by cube development for Commissions calculation and reporting and Revenue by product
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - Migration from spreadsheet dependency requires more just in time training; probably on site to maintain focus. Support to change from the top of management needs to loud and clear; and frequent.
- Training (user focus)
- Drill Across (client data table access)
- Dimension member combination capacity (for Revenue by Product & Customer)
Prophix Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - On call support usually determines if a functionality issue is in fact a bug; after escalation to the development team. The bug fix in a future release is identified. If determined to be an enhancement, there is an excellent Feedback Forum where customers vote on direction of development in next updates.
Template designed for a form of Income Statement by Account was highly resource intensive and impacted performance of all other activity within the cube. After Prophix Support exhausted conventional means of performance improvement and work around; and the business maintained its requirement for design of the template; Prophix Consulting (at not extra charge) built a dedicated Financial Reporting cube to generate the Template report hogging resources. Existence of the second reporting cube is nearly invisible to the end user; requiring some additional administrative maintenance but well worth the result.
Using Prophix
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | Lots to learn |
- Ad hoc Analysis
- Smart Monitor
- Template Studio
- Delta Analysis
- Model Manager
- Alternate Hierarchy
Yes, but I don't use it