PeopleSoft Activity-Based Management

Today's business environment requires an increasing number of diverse products, an expanding number of distribution channels, and greater reliance on advanced technology. In addition, cross-functional activities are now the norm and have created interconnectivity and mutual dependencies across departments and functions. This increasingly complex business environment has led to higher indirect and overhead costs and has made traditional cost accounting practices outdated.

Oracle's PeopleSoft Activity-Based Management goes beyond traditional accounting methods to deliver business intelligence that supports strategic and operational decision-making. It traces overhead costs based on the cause and effect of business activities to provide you with the real costs of business processes. Armed with this level of incisive cost and profitability analysis, you can answer strategic questions about your business such as:

How much does it cost to serve my customers?
Which customers, products, or channels are the most profitable?
Where are the best opportunities to reduce costs?
What products or services should we invest in or divest?

Strategic Cost Management

• Derive cost/benefit information for particular businesses, geographic markets, products, or customers.
• Use dynamic drivers to allocate resources to activities and cost objects in a repeatable and sustainable fashion.
• Monitor the productivity, capacity utilization, efficiency, and effectiveness of activities.

Real-Time Modeling

• Create, analyze, and modify models from a single page within a highly usable grid-like interface or visually through a graphical rendering of the model.
• Add or delete model objects or modify object costs, quantities, or relationships on the fly.
• Calculate model results with the push of a button, without having to run any batch processes.

Flexible Model Navigation

• Determine the economic impact of strategic decisions about resources, activities, products, services, customers, and channel costs.
• Graphically organize process relationships to determine the hierarchy of resources, activities, and cost objects.
• Use delivered bar and pie charts to analyze the contribution of any model object toward the total cost.

Multidimensional Profitability Analysis and Reporting

• Examine multiple dimensions of profitability and costs by product or customer segment.
• Investigate each component of the profit equation to convert loss makers into profit contributors.
• Perform variance and trend analysis by drilling down into research details.

Intelligent Planning and Budgeting

• Determine what level of resources you need in order to meet next year's forecasted demand.
• Analyze how changes in volume, product mix, and service mix influence costs and resources.
• Generate multiple planning scenarios to assess the consequences of major changes in your product or customer mixes.