Planview Announces New Business Process Manager with the Latest Release of Planview Enterprise Portfolio Management Software

Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager extends process management capabilities of Planview Enterprise

AUSTIN, Texas — July 31, 2007 — Planview, the leading independent provider of enterprise-wide portfolio management solutions, today introduced Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager bringing end-to-end business process modeling and management to the company's market leading portfolio management application suite. The Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager is an integrated component of Planview Enterprise®, introduced to help customers increase process adoption and accelerate process maturity to improve organizational performance and innovation.

The Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager allows portfolio management professionals to manage complex business processes by providing a single end-to-end view into business processes. This new product allows customers to manage a broad range of business processes from custom designed to those that leverage industry leading process models such as ITIL and Planview PRISMS®. Improving user adoption and effectiveness through increased visibility and automation, the Business Process Manager drives continuous process improvement by ensuring that processes meet business needs.

"Our customers have always viewed portfolio management as a business process change initiative, and our ability to help customers drive change is critical to their success. As we continue to see the discipline of portfolio management being adopted in more and more parts of the enterprise, the Business Process Manager gives our customers the opportunity to better integrate portfolio management processes into their broader business processes," said Pat Durbin, CEO and Founder of Planview, Inc.

Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager can be defined by four fundamental business process management factors:

• Process Design: Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager is an open business process management platform and will be available pre-loaded with Planview PRISMS best practices. Additionally, Business Process Manager can be flexibly used to implement industry standard practices such as PMBOK, Prince2, and ITIL, as well as in-house business process designs. Processes can be easily modeled with web-based "drag & drop" process editing tools.
• Process Automation: An extension of Planview Enterprise, the Business Process Manager adds organizational efficiency by automating initiation of routine tasks through existing software applications and reducing the costs of compliance tracking and formal audits.
• Process Adoption: Portfolio Management process user adoption is accelerated through the Business Process Manager by increased accessibility, process transparency, and process monitoring and measurement. A graphical index reports complete work and what remains outstanding.
• Process Measurement: Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager facilitates continuous improvement by monitoring and reporting what processes are used and who made what decisions.

The Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager will be available pre-loaded with Planview PRISMS Process Library, an industry-leading IT business management process knowledge base and best practices library. Established as a robust reference source, PRISMS becomes an interactive tool inside the Business Process Manager framework to define, compare and mature processes in 7 major areas: strategic planning; capacity management; demand management; funding and budgeting; work and resource management; cost management and benefit realization. In addition to Planview PRISMS, the Business Process Manager can integrate and bring visibility and automation to other industry standard practices and proprietary in-house best practices.

"One of the greatest challenges IT departments face when embarking on a project and portfolio management (PPM) initiative is an inherited deficiency in PPM process maturity," says Daniel B. Stang, PPM Principal Analyst for Gartner. "PPM system providers must continue to address this PPM roadblock by providing rich and readily available content, or starting points, to help their customers review and customize new PPM processes and automate these processes in a PPM system. Providing connections between this content (the process options) and process automation (the PPM system) allows PPM vendors to help their customers succeed in their PPM initiatives."

New Planview Enterprise 9.0.1

In addition to the introduction of Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager, Planview also released the latest version of its flagship industry-leading portfolio management solution, Planview Enterprise 9.0.1. The new version serves as the platform for Business Process Manager.

Planview Enterprise 9.0.1 offers several enhancements to the user interface, analytics for project and portfolio managers, and global workforce management. Updates to Planview Enterprise 9.0.1 include:

• Gantt chart added to the user interface as a configurable column, allocation and reserve profiling capabilities and newly available columns for earned value and percent complete calculations.
• More analytics such as configurable status reports with drill-down project-level and phase-level metrics and project-level bubble chart reporting.
• Extended capabilities for global workforce management including advanced management of labor rates and cost, particularly for external resources. Also segmentation of labor rates by a variety of factors including role, rate type/location and vendors.

Planview Enterprise 9.0.1 is the required platform for organizations looking to take advantage of Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager.

Planview Service Portfolio Management provides the tools to get control of business service spending - helping you to understand the total cost of IT business services, improve IT performance, simplify application infrastructure, and make strategic decisions about the use of technology and resources.