No Compromise

A3 was quietly brought in to companies where leading vendors failed to deliver satisfaction. While each of these stories of pain and business interruption and lost opportunity is unique, they all share some common elements clustered around our 5 Key Advantages. Here’s one story.
 
A large financial services company seeking greater speed, accuracy, detail and compliance in their planning and performance management processes, after a drawn out evaluation of multiple Corporate Performance Management platforms, promoted both A3 and a large, well known CPM vendor to the "finals." In the end, after weighing vendor size and financial strength, global support coverage, and engineering "depth", the prospect chose the much larger "household name." Such a strategy seemed like the safe choice, and C-level and Board approval of their selection of such a well-know firm were assured.
 
Eighteen months later we received a call from the customer hoping to find a solution to some insurmountable obstacles that had been encountered in their deployment. Two of these obstacles are described below.
 
Modeling Flexibility
Primary among the obstacles was their unwillingness to compromise on the detail and complexity of their financial modeling. For example, when forecasting cost center operations, the customer finds it essential to give users interactive visibility to the interplay between costs of capital, human resources, overhead and other items. For many years users had modeled these costs in spreadsheets, and only came to appreciate the value of this modeling capability when faced with the requirement that they give it up in order to "fit" the packaged application.
 
Deep Integration
The IT department faced another challenge:integration. In order to achieve a “comprehensive” CPM solution including reporting, budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, dashboards and analysis, the customer's IT department found itself installing multiple products each with different end-user and administrator interfaces, and independent security mechanisms. In addition, these products required up to three middleware and back-end technologies in order to "talk" to each other.
 
These and other issues ultimately stood in the way of the customer's ability to meet its goals of greater speed, accuracy, detail and compliance and re-opened the door for A3. Ultimately, we won back the business by proving our extraordinary modeling flexibility, by automating the very spreadsheet model that the customer was unwilling to give up, and by demonstrating a single, unified technology platform… nearly a "black box" installation for the customer's IT department.