PeopleSoft Continues Vertical Push

PeopleSoft recently moved to extend its position in the enterprise performance management (EPM) market by unveiling three new industry-specific solutions for manufacturing, healthcare, and communications. Announced in Las Vegas at the company's 2003 Leadership Summit, the EPM solutions use PeopleSoft's EPM platform as a base, but add prepackaged performance metrics and benchmarks, domain-specific data models, and industry-specific analytic applications. All three of the EPM for Industries solutions will be available in the fourth quarter of 2003. PeopleSoft EPM, which gives customers analytics tools to gain a complete view of the enterprise and track performance in real time, is built on a common standards-based platform that integrates data from any system. This reduces the need for expensive custom development and ongoing maintenance of multiple integration technologies, PeopleSoft officials say. "The new programs allow organizations that need industry-specific solutions to drive performance and address their industry's business processes and regulations without huge a budget, lengthy implementations, and customizations," says Lee Geishecker, research vice president at Gartner. The new EPM for Manufacturing product was designed to help manufactures deal with shortened product lifecycles, decreased manufacturing cycle times, and increased cost pressures. As manufacturers move from inventory-driven to demand-driven business processes the new offering includes a Manufacturing Scorecard that supports the Supply Chain Council's Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model. The scorecard enables managers to view critical metrics like delivery performance, fill rate, inventory turns, and cash-to-cash cycle time. PeopleSoft's Healthcare Scorecard provides healthcare management with the tools to manage through turbulent times. Only 12 percent of hospitals in the United States are profitable, according to the American Hospital Association. The AHA claims this is because of significant budget constraints due to lower reimbursement levels and increased regulation. The Healthcare Scorecard offers a visual dashboard that enables managers to monitor daily and monthly performance against strategic and operational goals. PeopleSoft EPM for Healthcare will also provide a real-time view of metrics critical to an organization's strategy, including average length of stay, case mix index, and census levels. PeopleSoft EPM for Communications is designed to help communications businesses control capital and operational expenditures, and to improve customer profitability--critical priorities in the face of unprecedented overcapacity and dramatic increases in customer churn. Profitability Management for Communications enables service providers to focus on retaining the most profitable customers and improving operational performance by analyzing network usage data from a variety or sources.