Item: Prophix
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Only used by the Finance Department. Used to replace our old legacy FP&A tool that no longer has any vendor support in 2 major areas:

Adhoc Reporting

Budgeting

Pros and Cons

Ease of maintaining account dimensions in hierarchical relationships within the Data Cube AKA Model Manager without requiring too many technicalities IT department intervention.
Adhoc Analysis provides fast slicing and dicing of information in a Pivot table style Finance users are accustomed to.
The ability to reuse/modify existing data views to redeploy in new reports makes creating new reports easier.

Dashboarding features and aesthetic options are quite limited compared with PowerBI.
Template Studio (Report Designer) tries to mimic Excel look and feel but lacks many Excel shortcut keys and formatting options.
Report loading performance may deteriorate substantially when a report template is derived from multiple data views.

Return on Investment

Streamlined annual budgeting process by reducing redundant data entry exponentially between branches and Finance departments.
Significantly faster access to consolidated financial data.
Easier to define core reporting structure elements e.g. rows and columns, page members, etc.

Uploading of data via CSV format can be done within a front-end functionality in Prophix called Process Manager. It was quite straight forward and easy to import data into the Prophix data cubes.

I fumbled around a bit trying to do the opposite. The export of data from Prophix to a user's local proves a bit of an effort. They initially DISABLE this functionality and require you to submit a change request ticket with Product Adoption/Support as a safety reminder against the potential security risks of doing so.

Deployment

We chose the Cloud option of deployment. As such, Prophix requires the client to install a middleware client that acts as the bridge between our data source and their cloud client.

I simply provided a SQL query that joins our conformed dimension tables and fact tables in our data warehouse to the implementation consultant. He then used it to connect the Prophix application middleware client to the Prophix staging tables. The numbers quickly matched our existing reports when validating/checking against the source data and from the ones seen in Prophix.

Originally I worried that this part would require more technical intervention from our IT department but it turns out the whole process was completed quickly within 15 minutes of troubleshooting.

Support Rating

Support would be improved if they received more background information about the clients coming off of a recent implementation. Does not appear that Implementation Consultants communicate effectively with support when transitioning them over to post implementation support. clients are expected to exercise patients and reiterate the same issue that with the support team as with the Implementation Consultant(s).

Alternatives Considered

PowerBIL much more powerful dashboarding features with better connectivity, faster product update rollouts, better support/feedback community.

Logi Analytics: more web developer-focused, but more powerful aesthetic customization and 3rd party API connectivity

Vena: evaluated to be similar to Prophix in terms of functionalities, but with a cleaner budgeting user interface. But product specific terminology used proves to be a steeper learning curve by the users without a background in relational databases

Likelihood to Recommend

They emphasize clients transitioning away from trying to manage too many spreadsheets. But from our experience in our budget implementation, we have budget information that must be referenced to offline spreadsheet sources which is not a feature currently supported by Prophix if the intention was to have users try to enter budget information using the cloud version.

They currently have a workaround for such clients for this particular scenario by introducing an Excel-Add on plug-in. What this does is it can import/export existing data views created from the cube onto a local spreadsheet. However, this feature only works for the data view, and not for Template Studio Reports, which is where the bulk of the Excel formatting/functionalities are required by users.

If clients are not fussy about the limited dashboard options and don't care too much about Excel functionalities when trying to replicate Excel-like reports within Prophix environment, then I would recommend it. Tries to replicate the look and feel of Excel but lacking.

Deep diving into financial data is quick and easy

Overall Satisfaction with Prophix