Gentia Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions help drive business performance at strategic, management and operational levels by measuring, analyzing, and communicating information that promotes corporate objectives and strategy.
Gentia’s EPM Application Framework for analytical applications offers both a methodology and an infrastructure for the rapid development and deployment of intelligent EPM applications. Designed as a complete analytical application environment, Gentia’s EPM framework delivers an unparalleled opportunity to link performance measurement and operational analysis within a single cohesive solution for enterprise-wide deployment.
The EPM framework provides a highly scalable, open, 3-tier architecture consisting of the following components:
The framework has been carefully designed to provide much of the commonly-used core EPM application functionality. By providing this functionality as a series of high-level application components, the Gentia’s EPM framework allows enterprises to rapidly develop and deliver customized EPM solutions to their end users. Additional benefits accrue through lower cost of application ownership, and consistency of user interface, which reduce the learning curve as new EPM applications are introduced.
The principal method for building applications in the EPM framework is via the Visual Development Environment. This applies a book-chapter-page metaphor to system objects such as tables and charts together with application objects, menus and page templates that come as part of the Application Framework.
Pages are built using the Builder Palette; objects are dragged and dropped onto the application page from where their custom attributes and behavior can be set.
Objects generally inherit core attributes from a base builder object. Alternatively, they may be modified through the Object Inspector to perform customized actions. Objects are linked to data using the Connections Mapper, which defines the locations of data sources and associates the object with a business model in the database.
Typically, the base level objects provided by the framework are enough to provide all the facilities required for the development of a custom EPM application. However, custom application objects can also be authored using the built-in Gentia Development Language (GDL). Using GDL, content authors can define custom event handling, dynamic SQL and interface directly to the EPM Object Store.
The Gentia EPM framework contains its very own multi-dimensional database server, derived from the Gentia Database technology. The EPM OLAP engine is a scalable, robust data storage mechanism that supports the definition of an unlimited number of relationships and dimensions across disparate collections of data.
Serving as the central store for EPM data, the OLAP engine offers two basic strategies for data storage and access:
