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FusionOps offers painless supply chain performance dashboards
Madan Sheina
FusionOps offers painless supply chain performance dashboards
FusionOps isn't really a household name in the business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) markets. However, we believe the company is doing a lot of things right to put itself firmly on the corporate BI radar screen. FusionOps' SaaS software, which applies to process automation and supply chain analytic applications, is quick, easy and relatively cheap to deploy. With TCO and ROI foremost in the minds of CIOs, FusionOps is certainly worth a closer look. The only reservations we have are FusionOps' extremely narrow view of PM and that its strategy could put it in direct competition with enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors it partners with. FusionOps is offering SAP-centric companies a quick and risk-free way to 'dabble' in PM
At a time when BI is becoming increasingly operationalised, companies are looking to marry analytics with their core business processes, many of which are typically modelled and run by their ERP suites. FusionOps' new Insight module, launched in November 2009, promises to do just that by plugging directly into a company's ERP system. Insight is billed as a PM application, but it is best described as a prebuilt dashboarding environment geared to generate analytic insights for supply chain optimisation, focusing on inventory, procurement, spend and supplier performance. The dashboards effectively pull in specific SAP ERP data schemas and sources, upload them into the cloud (a data centre hosted by Rackspace), render that data in a composite application that analyses performance, and deliver a range of metrics, reports and KPIs to business users. ERP customers are notified when metrics and reports are available online. This isn't really classic PM, since metrics are not necessarily rolled up to a company's strategic goals. Rather it's more akin to operational BI. The SaaS software works alongside FusionOps' sister product, called Streamline, which automates supply chain and procurement processes for SAP and Oracle ERP environments, also as an on-demand service. FusionOps - no relation to Oracle Fusion - is targeting SAP first and then Oracle, but the technology can feasibly be applied to any set of ERP applications that have exposed schemas. FusionOps provides professional services for customisation. FusionOps' approach hits all the right notes in the market
FusionOps Insight is unproven in the market, but it stands a good chance of success since it's aligned to the needs of today's cost-conscious IT budgets, removing much of the installation and configuration graft behind setting up a BI application, such as data cleansing, ETL, application integration and presentation formatting. FusionOps' SaaS delivery means rapid deployment (Insight can be integrated with an ERP system and up and running in hours), low start-up costs (Insight is priced at $1,000 per user, for a minimum of ten users, with enterprise data hosting at $3,000 a month per company) and quick ROI (within eight to 12 weeks, the company claims) with measurement and tracking of a business process available in a matter of hours, as opposed to days or months. The company could face a backlash from its ERP partners
While the ROI of SaaS-based BI is apparent, FusionOps' ERP-centric approach could also be tricky to manage. We see potential conflicts arising as both SAP and Oracle now provide their own BI tools - Business Objects and Hyperion, as both on-premise and SaaS offerings - which they aggressively pitch to their own ERP bases. It's unlikely that either of these two companies is going to stand aside and cede BI deals to FusionOps in the long term. FusionOps is hoping that its rapid speed of implementation and out-of-the-box metrics will be compelling enough for SAP or Oracle customers facing a long and expensive nine-month BusinessObjects or Hyperion tools deployment. But in spite of providing a low-cost supply chain analytic alternative, many end-user organisations will still be unwilling to gamble such an important function on a less trusted BI supplier. Also, make no mistake: Insight is no substitute for a full-blown enterprise performance management system. Right now Insight is a read-only application. That makes it difficult to perform forward-looking planning, forecasting and simulations. Nor is there any way for users to write back the analytics into the ERP system for closed-loop action. Finally, Insight is only optimised for SAP application environments, with Oracle support expected soon. Companies looking to integrate other data sources will have to do some custom development in conjunction with business process management systems to build automated processes and dashboards.
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