Thursday, July 17, 2008

Tips from the Big Guys: Yahoo Shares Planning Architecture and EPM Strategies

With so much focus on Yahoo’s search advertising strategy and ongoing battles with Microsoft, a webinar that focuses solely on their internal planning and back-end processes is a welcome diversion, not to mention a fascinating education. The Yahoo EPM Webinar, sponsored by Star Analytics and Key Performance Ideas, provided insight into how one very large company deals with key performance management issues, including:

  • Creating highly efficient planning systems
  • Maintaining data integrity
  • Improving corporate reporting standards

Bob Yau, a Director of Corporate Applications at Yahoo, walked through their Enterprise Performance Management strategy and architecture and discussed how they have successfully implemented a project to help Yahoo efficiently manage change in a highly competitive market.

Yahoo has created a technical architecture for managing and exporting Hyperion Planning and Essbase data that provides their global business community with 24x7 access to near real-time planning and reporting data. Data is scheduled and automatically exported frequently throughout the day from the Planning application and is (again, automatically) synchronized with their Oracle Data Warehouse, eliminating data latency. Other benefits (and key project requirements) include their ability to maintain corporate reporting standards and improve compliance.

While the webinar does get technical (that’s right, architectural diagrams and everything) Mr. Yau does an excellent job of focusing as much on the business requirements and user needs as the technical implementation. Mr. Yau finishes off the webinar with his ‘Top 10’ lessons learned from his implementation, which covers both technical and business experience. #10 – Partner with the business for success. Good advice. Thanks Yahoo for providing such an insightful view into some of your key processes that support your enterprise performance management.

View webinar

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