Oco, Inc., the leading innovator of enterprise-class Software-as-a-Service business intelligence (SaaS BI) solutions, recently announced two new SaaS BI products that enable users to analyze complex cost structures in order to find new ways to increase profitability. The new offerings include Oco Contract Compliance Analytics and Oco Spend Variance Analytics.

Oco Contract Compliance Analytics is a turn-key cost analysis solution that reveals how well vendors, carriers and other contractors are complying with the terms of their agreements. With so many supply chain partners operating in dynamic environments, compliance visibility is challenging. For example, within transportation spend, the Oco solution identifies aggregate contract spend variance and the underlying influence of load changes, contract carrier overcharges, the use of non-compliant carriers, and expediting charges. By automatically highlighting variations from contract terms, the new Oco solution saves business people the time and effort needed to manually research contract compliance and eliminates most overcharges.

Oco Spend Variance Analytics breaks down the factors contributing to any cost, margin or profitability variance and flags the causes contributing to the variances between planned and actual performance. For example, the new Oco solution could determine why a negotiated lower-cost supply chain sourcing contract is not providing the expected savings and whether it is due to changes in exchange rates, point-of-sale volume and mix changes, inventory costing methods contributing to more expensive valuations being pulled from inventory, supplier overcharging or other factors. This capability greatly simplifies profitability analysis for finance executives and allows them to quickly take corrective action.

"In the current economy, it is vitally important for companies to find cost-saving opportunities as soon as possible and to provide upward guidance to executive management," said Krishna Roy, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. "However, monitoring and understanding complex cost structures within medium and large-sized companies can be very challenging, especially with cost data existing in multiple systems, locations and formats. Turn-key, on-demand SaaS BI solutions can provide companies with a faster, lower-risk solution to the challenge with much lower start-up costs and no data center overhead."

Both solutions are built on Oco’s enterprise-class SaaS BI platform. Oco simplifies the costly and time-consuming process of integrating, warehousing and presenting data from SAP and other enterprise applications that contain the data required for these analytics. Results are served to business people via easy-to-use, web-based interactive scorecards, what-if dashboards, multi-dimensional reports, and ad-hoc analysis tools. The on-demand, turn-key solution eliminates the development and data center costs associated with traditional on-premise BI solutions, and more importantly, is implemented in a fraction of the time, usually within several weeks.

SOURCE: Oco Launches Two New Cost Analytics SaaS BI Solutions