Customers By Industry
Manufacturing
The Host Analytics suite of Corporate Performance Management software enables manufacturing organizations to improve the sales planning and forecasting process thereby eliminating poor inventory planning. With the online forecasting capabilities, Host Analytics enables multiple departments including production, marketing, sales and finance to more accurately forecast demand, update that information in real-time and adjust operational plans to ensure an optimal forecast and demand planning process. The ability to create different forecasts from different perspectives helps sales translate their plan to production (stock versus new inventory) which optimizes inventory levels. Sales is able to forecast in multiple ways including by product, customer, rebates or by SKU, giving production and other departments clear visibility into demand.
Retail
Some people call retailing, detailing due to the tiny details involved in budgeting and planning involved in the retail industry. Take for example a retail chain with 30 stores, 5 departments, 100 accounts and 15,000 line items. Chaos can strike when you ask a retail store to complete a budget. In retail, a top-down budgeting approach works best. Host Analytics enables retailers to create top-down budgets based on past performance and goals for the new year. By coupling the budget with projected sales forecasts, retail managers can clearly determine the labor required and adjust that as the actual are reported against the forecast.
The Host Analytics scorecarding application enables each store manager to track their performance against the plan and benchmark themselves against other locations. Scorecarding helps managers understand if the labor versus sales ratio is “off” so that it doesn’t become a profit leak. The application can also help minimize interstore transfers, deliveries and items out of tolerance to help improve profitability. The Host Analytics system for retail accommodates complex calculations including sales by labor, sales forecasts compared to labor and expenses.
Consumer Package Goods/Food and Beverage
The consumer package goods industry has all the complexities of typical manufacturers PLUS they have to deal with marketing spend, certified marketing funds, aggregation and disaggregation of products (making soup and selling a cow for parts).
Higher Education/Not for Profit
The Host Analytics suite of Corporate Performance Management software enables local, state and federal agencies to improve their budgeting and planning processes. Each year higher education institutions prepare their budgets taking into account last year’s commitments and this years needs. Based on increased revenue projections, and decision packages for the coming year, the plan and budget are modified. Host Analytics enables higher education institutions to create a baseline budget and how different decision packages or new initiatives impact the baseline.
Healthcare
The healthcare industry is highly regulated and therefore, benchmarked. As competition heats up and benchmarks are used to track the performance of hospitals and other healthcare-related businesses, the ability to easily track performance metrics inside the organization becomes critical. The Host Analytics Scorecarding application enables healthcare organizations to track detailed performance metrics such as emergency response times, regulatory compliance, deaths per year by cause, complete medical treatment sheets after patient discharge, overall quality of patient care.
In addition to the need to track performance metrics for competitive advantage, healthcare organizations have a unique budgeting and planning process and drivers that contribute to the process. Host Analytics gives healthcare organizations the ability to build solid performance metrics and track performance over time while enabling detailed budgeting that is meaningful to the industry.
Services
In a services organization it is all about optimizing the scarce resource of employees helping customers achieve their goals. Host Analytics customers in the services industry have leverage the Host CPM suite to: Consolidate world wide multi-currency business units; dynamically manage the resource allocation of employees; match the right skillsets to the right customer at the right location for the right time in the project; collect budgets and forecasts from resource managers around the world.
Technology
In the wake of the dot com boom, the financial and operational performance of technology companies is under the microscope. It is no longer sufficient to have a good idea and go public on that idea. Investors are scrutinizing every new idea that walks through their doors for viability and long-term steady growth potential. For existing technology companies, shareholders are demanding better corporate governance and steady profitable growth. So how are companies competing and excelling? Many are turning to Business Performance Management software to help them better budget and strategically plan, accurately forecast, and monitor their key performance indicators.