Acorn Systems Inc., relaunched in 2001 after its 1996 founding as a consulting company to help organizations analyze their profitability, is the developer of the Enterprise Performance Suite, a software product that helps companies understand costs and profitability by customer, product, geographic region, and other parameters.
Unlike other activity-based costing tools, Acorn's Enterprise Performance Suite lets companies model even large, complex businesses. And because the software integrates tightly with ERP and other transaction-based systems, manufacturers can use it to drill into customer or product information to understand their profitability at a detailed level, even as business conditions change.
"We can give people detailed analysis, such as resource utilization numbers, so they can understand where they have constraints and excess capacity," says Acorn CEO Leland Putterman.
Earlier this year, SAP AG entered into a partnership with Acorn to resell the Enterprise Performance Suite as one of its governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) offerings aimed at chief financial officers.
Acorn has been able to sidestep some of the problems generally associated with analytical techniques, such as activity-based costing, says John Hagerty, vice president at AMR Research. "They've been more focused on the outcome rather than the process. And the outcome is helping companies understand where they are and are not profitable."
In the near future, Putterman says, Acorn will begin to tailor its tool to give profitability views into specific aspects of a manufacturer's business. For example, Acorn will add a tool to help manufacturers understand and optimize logistics costs.
- YEAR FOUNDED: 2001 (originally 1996, as a consulting firm)
- PRODUCT NAME AND CATEGORY: Enterprise Performance Suite/cost and profit analysis
- INDUSTRY SEGMENTS SERVED: Automotive, chemicals, CPG, distribution, electronics, financial services, food & beverage, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, retail
- KEY PROBLEM SOLVED: Provides an easy way to collect information from ERP and other legacy systems, and analyze it to understand which operations, customers, etc., are profitable and which are not
- DIFFERENTIATION: Allows manufacturers to model and analyze even complex businesses, and scales to support large enterprises
- TOP CUSTOMERS: Fairchild Semiconductor, Assan Aluminyum, Tempel Steel Co.
- FUNDING: $19 million to date from two rounds of venture capital raised from Austin Ventures and Insight Venture Partners