Overview of JustPerform's Platform Capabilities
Data Blending: Raw data comes in many different shapes and sizes. Data blending is the process of combining data from multiple sources into a functional dataset. You are tasked with combining data from various sources and shaping it to generate insights quickly. Build your workflows in an intuitive, visual, drag-and-drop environment.
Automated Data Preparation: Preparing data for analysis is one of the most important steps in any project—and traditionally, one of the most time-consuming. Automated Data Preparation handles this task for you by analyzing your data, identifying fixes, screening out problematic or non-useful fields, and deriving new attributes when appropriate. This enables you to make your data ready for model building quickly and easily, without needing prior coding knowledge.
Modelling Workbench: The Modelling Workbench allows power users (modelers) to structure data models to achieve business outcomes. It provides the capability to create dimensions, dimension attributes, and models or data tables.
Business Rules Library: Business rules are a set of calculations or data processing tasks created visually by business users. By providing a framework for defining various types of business rules, JustPerform helps avoid the need for expert coding in most cases. Business Rules Library includes:
Account Mapping: Map data from existing accounts and flows to new members. Typical use cases include generating statements of changes in equity from financial statements, indirect cash flow, notes to accounts, and auto reclassifications.
Allocations: Allocations are a helpful tool for users to distribute values collected on one object to several other receiving objects. Typical use cases include product costing, profitability and cost analysis, cost distribution, and management reporting.
Value Driver Tree: A Value Driver Tree is a visual representation of a business model covering key metrics and establishing relationships between key metrics and underlying drivers. The relationships are established using simple VDT expressions or functions. It is designed to be simple and easy to learn while exposing the power and flexibility of underlying models. It can be compared to applying Excel formulas to multi-dimensional models.
Automatic Journals: Automatic journals are primarily applicable for consolidation use cases. Automation rules allow period-end journal entries to be created and populated based on data and rules, and posted automatically, eliminating considerable manual period-end work.
Extendable AI and ML Engine: JustPerform allows two-way integration with machine learning platforms, enabling users to drive accurate decisions with forecasting that leverages powerful, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Examples of algorithms that support intelligent forecasting include classification, regression, dimension reduction, and clustering, using advanced methods such as deep learning, tree-based methods, and logistic regression.
Enterprise Collaboration: Enables sharing of scenarios and business rules with relevant business users to align on business outcomes, actions or steps, and rules defined to achieve these outcomes.
Workflow Designer: Orchestrate approved business processes into a series of activities and tasks using the workflow designer. Share workflows with relevant users for alignment, and finally publish workflows for execution.
Process Monitoring and Reporting: Monitor the progress of processes based on designed workflows, generate notifications based on data alerts or workflow completion schedules.
Reports and Insights: JustPerform is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365, connecting online Excel or native (desktop) Excel to interact with data in JustPerform. Additionally, JustPerform dashboards use visualizations to convey business insights as a story. Unlike conventional dashboards, JustPerform allows for two-way interaction with data, enabling users to update data, execute activities and tasks, and analyze data. It also allows users to share and present insights with others.
Outbound API’s: Extend the usage of data in JustPerform by connecting it with downstream applications like data warehouses, BI tools, planning and/or consolidation tools, or files.
Key Platform Features
About Spaces
Spaces are segregations of business processes through applications and models. A Workspace consists of one or more spaces, with each space comprising processes addressing different business use cases like financial planning, consolidation, and other FPA solutions.
The purpose of a space is to collaborate and deploy business processes with specific groups of people within a particular workspace. Spaces break down your workspace into different high-level initiatives.
Spaces comprise business processes and models that support these processes. Each model contains the business information that controls the data in the space. Models can share one or more fields with other models in other spaces within the workspace.
Each space has a predefined structure with folders that guide process definition and grouping. Although many spaces can be created under one workspace, changes made to one space will not affect the other spaces.
Note: You can create Spaces under a Workspace for different business processes and group users for collaboration and defining the specific process. JustPerform, being a unified platform, has the benefit of having different planning and consolidation processes under different spaces.
A Workspace holds multiple spaces, while each space created for a specific business purpose holds all the applications required to deploy the solution on the platform, including activities, calculations, modeling (fields, models, modules), and stories created for process execution.
About Drive
Drive carries all the navigation menus and features required for process definition. After space creation, users navigate to the Drive by clicking the icon from Space Explorer. Business users using the Drive menu can create components such as processes, stories, calculations, and data flows to define business process-related configurations to serve business objectives. The Drive menu guides users to configure the process following the process-first approach.
Process
A Business Process is a set of activities and actions required to achieve a particular business outcome. To make it easier and more convenient for users to visualize and define a business process, the system provides three functionalities under the Process section: Scenario Management, Process Flow, and Instance Creation.
Scenario Management: Scenarios cover different aspects and attributes of any process, such as scenarios in actual business activities, required dimensions, calculation logics, and other business rules. This function allows users to define scenario groups and detailed scenarios to cover business requirements.
Process flow: Process flow is a sequence of activities and tasks to be executed by users. This function allows users to view the entire business process and understand which actions to engage.
Instance Creation: An instance can be considered a variant of the process flow with predefined characteristics and dimensions. For example, a business process flow to be released for the fiscal year of 2021 or 2022. Based on the forecasting or budgeting cycle for each process flow, multiple instances can be created for users to perform.
For detailed information, please refer to the Process section.
Stories
The Stories section is considered a library where all the templates (including input schedules and reports) are maintained. These templates are tagged/assigned to specific steps in the process flow that require user engagement.
Input Templates: Maintain Input schedules.
Reports: Maintain Reports.
Data Mapping: Maintain Mapping files.
Consolidation Central: Journal Manager.
Calculations
Business Rules: Maintain rules using the business rule engine, such as account reclass, account mapping, allocation, eliminations, and others.
Value Driver Tree: This is fundamental for planning and budgeting exercises. The Value Driver Tree helps users define planning rules using calculation formulas and assign appropriate accounts to components of the formula.
For detailed information, please refer to the Calculations section.
Data Flow
Data Management: Complete data management configuration-related functions can be performed here, like creating data connections and data flows, with data flow mappings configurations.
About Modelling
As the business environment evolves, so do the organization's planning needs. Rather than ignoring the need to change the planning process due to the complexity involved in updating technology, business planners can rely on JustPerform's Intelligent Modelling Capabilities to update their planning models. JustPerform intelligently translates business processes and the Value Driver Tree defined by planners into dynamic models ready for process execution.
Modelling involves system configuration related to setting up data structures like models and their corresponding fields and other related information.
Note: A model can meet the business planning and consolidation requirements of an organization. A model is an interface to plan, consolidate, and report data. The functionality of modules and models enables business users to create new modules based on purpose, group these modules under a model, and utilize them to create a report and Value Driver Tree on their own.
Fields
Fields capture metadata information regarding business needs. They guide users to define the level of detail for business needs and maintain master data configuration of these fields on the platform. Fields also allow users to maintain the relationship between the master data as per the organizational structure. Fields are created and categorized into different groups based on their purposes, including:
Metrics: Quantitative measurements that consist of dimensions, including key KPIs, chart of accounts, etc., that drive the planning process.
Enterprise Structure: Dimensions required for reporting in the planning or consolidation process. The business's existing organizational structure with a defined hierarchy can be replicated in the enterprise structure with modifications depending on the planning or consolidation requirements.
System Level: Dimensions required for data classification and populated from the reference app-level selected with predefined master data.
Customized: Based on business requirements, users can create new classifications or groups to maintain specific dimensions.
Models
Module: A module comprises unique dataset combinations with dimensions within a process for data input or reporting.
Model: A model is a functional grouping of modules that form a datastore object for capturing and reporting the data within the modules' dataset.
For detailed information, please refer to the Modelling section.
About Governance
The most important thing for an organization is data security. In JustPerform, users have access only to the data associated with their assigned roles. Workspace leads can determine and allocate the necessary access levels for each user.
Permissions enable the definition and maintenance of user permissions such as roles, authorizations, and data access based on the business requirements. These permissions are then assigned to relevant business users. For detailed information, see Permissions in JustPerform
Audit Reports includes event log and data log information settings and information for future releases.