What Is ARM?
Alacrity Results Management (ARM) is a product that provides a powerful toolbox for Performance Management and other application areas. It supplies the components required to build custom performance management systems (or other applications which require multiple hierarchies of numeric information) analogous to the way Microsoft® Excel provides the ability to use cells and formulas to analyze numbers. Far beyond Excel, ARM provides powerful tools to manage the complexity inherent in a ‘real world’ system, while being both flexible and scalable.
Excellent uses for ARM include:
· budgeting
· activity-based costing
· performance management
· modelling
Figure 1 – High Level ARM view
The diagram above shows ARM at a very high level. The core is a Database and Calculation Engine which is fed from
· real-time inputs
· automatic data from other computer systems
· manual entry (shared entry by your key staff and stakeholders)
ARM allows you to:
· View up-to-date data on-line using various screen views
· Generate e-mail notifications for out of range values
· Export the data you are viewing to Excel
· Print customized formatted reports
You may be asking yourself “why can’t I just do it in Excel?”. If you are following a small number of values and the calculations are not very complicated, perhaps you may reasonably use Excel; however, if you have a multi-level (performance management) system with many data points and complicated calculations, or if you require more than one concurrent user, Excel is not an appropriate application for that purpose. For a detailed discussion of using Excel vs. ARM for large complicated models, view: http://www.CherniakSoftware.com/homepage/ARM/ARMvsExcel.pdf
ARM is a single package that combines the following:
- A modelling tool (allowing you to model your business down to the lowest level in which you are interested)
- A data warehouse (taking data from multiple sources in your company and storing it in the company model in a common format)
- An inquiry tool (allowing you to query on information at all levels in the model using multiple views see ARM Outputs)
- A reporting tool (providing formatted Excel worksheets from any worksheet; custom reports can be achieved using Crystal Reports)
From a technical point of view, ARM is written in Visual Age Smalltalk, and uses a GemStone database as the back end. ARM, developed in a fully object client and server model, is being used to drive a model that is essentially object oriented as well, consisting of groups and members rather than classes and instances.
The remainder of this article will explore the various outputs from a user point of view, delve into ARM’s technical architecture, then discuss the benefits of the ARM approach.
Next section: Why Performance
Management?