New Generation Software, Inc. (NGS) has announced Decision AssistûBusiness Performance, a new business analytics solution for System i customers and ISVÆs who want to modernize and improve their customer, sales, and inventory reporting and analysis capabilities.

The solution, developed with NGS' business intelligence application development tools, integrates with and enhances the presentation of DB2 data through the use of NGS' own business intelligence tools, plus Adobe Flash and Microsoft Office software. It includes a Web portal, business performance dashboards, multi-dimensional models, and Excel spreadsheets and reports, all built over a pre-defined DB2 for i5/OS data mart on the System i. Decision AssistûBusiness Performance supports i5/OS V5R1 and above.

NGS offers a fully-integrated version of Decision AssistûBusiness Performance to users of Vormittag Associates, Inc.'s (VAI) S2K enterprise management software. To learn more about this special version, visit NGS. Training is available to help System i customers and ISVÆs integrate Decision AssistûBusiness Performance to other System i-based enterprise software applications.

Decision AssistûBusiness Performance dashboards include:

• Customer sales by parent and individual company with monthly totals and month-to-month variance
• Customer sales history with monthly totals and month-to-month variance
• Sales representative performance - overall, by customer class, and by division
• Inventory by division and warehouse - on hand, monthly average, and monthly value
• Four week sales analysis by company and item - net sales, quantity shipped, gross sales, and margin

The software includes more than 60 ready-to-run management reports that output to Excel spreadsheets, NGS-IQ's OLAP module, PDF, and HTML. These reports enable a company to better monitor customer profitability, company and sales representative performance, inventory, and vendors.

"We know companies want greater visibility into their customer, sales, and inventory performance, but often find the process required to provide the data to management is labor intensive and therefore, too slow to be used proactively. With Decision AssistûBusiness Performance, they can quickly achieve their goals," explains Bernard Gough, CEO and president of New Generation Software.

Companies with data security or compliance concerns can license NGS' IQ SeQure security management system with Decision AssistûBusiness Performance to give them control over data access at the field and record level by user. This module also enables a customer to block specific users from functions such as FTP, e-mail, and downloading data to Windows when creating and running reports.

With over 20,000 iSeries users across the globe, NGS has been an industry leader since 1982 in developing high performance, field-proven business intelligence and financial management software for midrange users. Both NGS-IQ Business Intelligence and the Concert Series Financial Management System are recognized by IBM as IBM ServerProven Solutions. NGS is an Advanced Member of IBM PartnerWorld and a member of the System i Initiative for Innovation.