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Q: What does Longview Solutions sell?
A: Longview Solutions helps companies manage the business of finance with a unified, scalable application that can automate any one, or combination of, the following financial processes; Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Consolidation, Tax Provisioning, Management Reporting and Profitability Analytics. This application is referred to as Longview 7.
Q: What is the relationship between Khalix, the Longview Performance Management Platform and Longview 7?
A: Khalix and the Longview Performance Management Platform are terms that have been used widely throughout Longview’s history to describe our application software. Khalix and the Longview Performance Management Platform have not disappeared, however our software has evolved to it’s newest version, Longview 7.
Q: What are the unique attributes of Longview 7?
It is a single application that meets the diverse needs of the CFO. Rather than using a variety of tools that can compromise results, Longview's single application enables you to plan, report, and analyze information in a manner best suited to your company's needs. With Longview 7, every user works with a reliable, consistent, and comprehensive view of the entire company's operation. A single source of business rules and data is used as the basis for every business process. The solution's calculation engine, strongest in the industry, enables you to model any metric for your particular organization or industry requirement. To learn more please visit our press release detailing the release of Longview 7.
Q: What is your pricing and licensing model?
A: Longview Solutions offers a very simple pricing and licensing model. Our application, a single integrated technology platform, is licensed by process, not by number of users, hardware platform, etc. The five typical processes are:
There is no restriction as to number of users. New releases and new versions are provided to customers who are current on maintenance.
Q: What exactly do you mean when you say that Longview 7 is a global application?
A: The global focus of Longview 7 enables companies to have seamless access to enterprise information in multiple countries and locations. Its advanced communication architecture enables high-speed, secure network access to enterprise-wide information with negligible impact on companies' worldwide network bandwidth. It is also uniquely equipped to handle and convert currencies and accounting practices from around the globe.
Q: How does Longview 7 complement Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems?
A: Bridging the gap between raw data and useful information, the Longview 7 contributes exceptional data manipulation and analysis capabilities to the effective transactional processing functionality provided by ERP systems.
Q: What is your implementation process?
A: Successful implementation is our unwavering goal, achieved through support by experienced project managers, best-in-class system architects, and a proven and unique methodology focused on speed and quality of delivery. We consistently deliver the results our customers expect. Every project is assigned an executive sponsor from Longview Solutions - to sit on the steering committee of each engagement and ensure expectations are being met. This is an important component of Longview Solutions' customer-intimate business model.
The first part of the implementation process is a scoping session. This takes place during the sales process, before a software license agreement is signed. The scoping process enables us to accurately capture and communicate the overall cost of the project as well as the division of deliverables and responsibilities between Longview and our customer in a detailed scope document. This document outlines the goals, objectives and deliverables for the project. It also details specific resource requirements, tasks, timelines and success measures. The scope process ensures that you are fully aware of the total cost of ownership.
Implementation services are an integral component of our Corporate Performance Management solution. Comprised of finance and technology professionals, our implementation team works efficiently and effectively, using proprietary methodologies, to assess each client's unique business challenges and tailor the Longview application to exceed expectations.
Once a project is initiated the following implementation services are provided:
- A detailed work plan is developed
- Conceptual design is developed
- Software install
- Detailed design documentation is developed
- Configuration
- data conversion
- System testing
- Data loading and balancing
- Acceptance testing
- Production cutover
- Post implementation review
Q: What post-implementation services do you offer such as training or sourcing?
A: To our customers, Longview Solutions recommends that the person(s) designated to act as system administrators are key participants in the set-up and implementation of the application to ensure knowledge transfer throughout the implementation process. Our mission during the implementation is to empower the finance organization. When the Longview Solutions implementation team leaves the client site, the users have the knowledge they need and are extremely proficient with the application. In addition, Longview offers classroom and on-site training as well as just in time E-learning for system administrators, end users and end user trainers.
Longview Learning and Knowledge Management has been specifically designed for organizations with a large, geographically diverse and ever changing end user community. The solution provides just in time role based, monitored learning for new as well as occasional users.
Ongoing implementation services also include various consulting projects such as audits of how our customers are using the application and how they might take better advantage of it, performance tuning, and additional phases of implementation.
Q: What is Longview Learning and Knowledge Management?
A: Longview's learning and knowledge management process, using your organizational direction and objectives as a backdrop, provides a repository of knowledge from which many users across a large enterprise can collaborate, share policies and procedures, teach, evolve, and control information in real time.
Q: What industry standards does Longview 7 support?
A: In harmony with an organization's overall IT strategy, the Longview application is engineered to work with a wide variety of industry standard components including:
Technical Requirements Datasheet
Clients
Windows® XP, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer® 6,7
Servers
Windows® 2003 Server
Web Servers
Microsoft IIS®
Databases:
SQL Server®, Oracle® (on any hardware platform or operating system)
Q: Is your platform portal enabled? Explain.
A: The Longview Platform can itself serve as a portal containing links and content from Longview and non-Longview sources. Alternatively, links to the Longview application can be placed on 3rd party portals.
Q: Is your platform OLAP enabled? Explain.
A: The Longview Platform is a fully enabled, single database, OLAP application supporting multi-dimensional query and analysis capabilities as well as data drill down. Our robust security ensures that users only have access to the appropriate data on either are read only or update basis.
In addition, the Longview application is ODBC-compliant and can work with other OLAP tools. Standard functions in our software create Microsoft Analysis Services cubes for static, offline report publishing where required.
Q: Explain how your platform handles multi-GAAP requirements and IFRS
A: Multi-GAAP requirements are handled by supporting an unlimited number of unique rollup structures and business rules. As an example, different account rollup structures can be set up to support both U.S. and Canadian GAAP requirements and different business rules can be set up to report currency translation adjustments on the Income Statement for Canadian reporting and on the Balance Sheet for U.S. reporting.
The Longview application contains all the capabilities required to handle the statutory consolidation requirements of IFRS. This, combined with our experience in helping European customers produce IFRS-compliant statutory consolidated results, strongly positions Longview to support North American organizations adopting IFRS. Longview has also launched a series of initiatives to help companies grappling with IFRS, for further information please visit our IFRS resource centre.
Q: Does your platform support specific management methodologies such as balanced scorecard, EFQM, Six Sigma, ABC, etc? Explain.
A: Data can be easily imported from an unlimited number of source systems into the Longview application providing a single database that is rich with the intelligence that is required to support the information requirements of any organization's current and future management methodologies including those listed above. The Longview application makes it easy for users across the organization to access and share a wide variety of information from a single application that provides information to stakeholders when and how they want it regardless of their unique PC/Web skills.
Q: Does your application contain a workflow or business process management component? Explain.
A: The robust workflow capabilities in the Longview application ensure that data creators and approvers always know the exact status of data for which they are responsible. The workflow process also ensures that data is available to users when they need to create or update it, and that it is protected from unwanted updates when pending approval or once approval has been received at any level in the process.
Q: Does your application share a common data model? Explain.
A: Yes. The Longview application is a single integrated technology platform. All budgeting, forecasting, planning, consolidation, tax provisioning, management reporting and analysis, and profitability management processes use a single database and single set of structures and rules ensuring integrity amongst all of our customers' key financial business processes.
Q: What third party business intelligence tools and technologies does your Platform support? Explain.
A: The Longview application supports all third party business intelligence tools and technologies that are ODBC compliant. Standard functions include the creation of Microsoft Analysis Services cubes for static reports.
Q: How does Longview integrate data from multiple source systems such as SAP, Oracle, Data warehouse, Legacy systems, etc.?
A: Longview provides a broad suite of data and metadata integration capabilities including:
- Robust ETL functionality to extract data from one or more data sources, platforms
- Hundreds of prebuilt adapters including certified adapters for SAP, Oracle Applications, and other leading databases and applications
- Data validation, including exception handling and alerting
- Automated or on-demand loading of data into the required (multi-dimensional) format
- Hierarchy synchronization
- Real-time updates, if required
Longview can easily cater to customers with varying degrees of requirements:
- Sophisticated needs – end to end automation of data and metadata loads
- Some automation needs - the system handles repeatable data mapping and transformation steps while there is manual control over loading and validating data (on-demand)
- Simple or infrequent data integration needs – native Bridging process which uses pre-populated data from source systems (ASCII files) to input data into Longview, still utilizing the data loading and data validation capabilities that are native to the product.
Q: How does Longview integrate with BI and Reporting tools such as Microstrategy, Cognos, Business Objects/Crystal, OBIEE, WebFOCUS, etc.?
A: Longview already has native capabilities for CPM specific reporting and analysis. However, often times, companies have a need to combine CPM data with historical analysis using BI tools or may have a single BI standard for all reporting including compliance reporting.
The Longview 7 Service Oriented Architecture provides a wide array of tools and services based on open industry standards that facilitate easy integration and interoperability with 3rd party applications including BI and reporting applications.
This allows Longview to be BI agnostic and integrate with one or more BI applications (including the ones listed above) in several ways depending on customer requirements.
Longview provides an ODBC driver, an Operational Data Store (ODS) or a sophisticated Integration Suite to provide different options to access the multidimensional data and application logic. These integration methods provide readily usable output data that already reflects the application logic such as virtual rollups and other transformation. Hierarchies within Longview are available in BI friendly slice-dice format.
In addition to the above, Batch triggers and event triggers can be used in conjunction with the ODS to provide timely input to the BI tools.
There are several benefits to this BI integration approach including:
- BI agnostic architecture. Integrate with Business objects, Cognos, OBIEE, Hyperion, or any other BI tool (or multiple BI tools) of your choice
- Leverage existing applications and investments
- Facilitates best of breed implementations
- Dual benefit of using BI tools for BI specific analysis and CPM tools for CPM specific analysis
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