Board
Board was founded in 1994 and employs more than 500 people worldwide. Both its European head office and software development headquarters are in Chiasso, Switzerland. A second regional US headquarters is located in Boston, Massachusetts. Board has 25 offices worldwide and a global partner network. More than 3,000 customers globally use Board to implement CPM and analytics projects. The company currently has a strong focus on internationalization, particularly by expanding its presence in the United States. The ownership of the company changed in 2019, when Nordic Capital acquired a majority share in Board to support the vendor’s continued international expansion.
Board aims to provide an all-in-one decision-making platform which unifies CPM with BI and analytics capabilities. The vendor focuses on providing end-to-end support to key decision-making processes in mid-size to large enterprises by combining self-service capabilities with enterprise scalability and governance. The goal is to deliver an easy-to-use and coding-free toolkit for business power users to build tailored CPM and analytics applications in a technically homogeneous environment. Board does not focus on specific industries, but the primary industries across its customer base are retail, manufacturing, professional services, banking and finance.
Board provides a combined product consisting of a front end and a proprietary multidimensional in-memory data processing technology, which also allows for business-user-friendly data modeling. The product provides a consistent environment for administration, development and utilization. Due to its tightly integrated front and back ends, the proprietary Board data model allows only limited access for third-party front ends. Board is available in the cloud (leveraging Microsoft Azure) and, if required, on-premises.
At its core, Board is a flexible web-based development environment for creating dashboarding, reporting, analysis, planning and predictive and advanced analytics applications that can also be used for financial consolidation and strategy management. Particularly for planning, forecasting and simulation use cases, Board offers strong and comprehensive functionality. Users can create and tailor a broad range of applications specifically to their own needs, bringing together financial and operational data. Moreover, Board and its partners offer prebuilt business content via the Board Marketplace. Applications such as financial consolidation, lease accounting, human resources management, integrated business planning and sales performance management are available from Board itself. Additionally, Board and its partners offer solutions for specific departments (e.g., finance, supply chain) and industries (e.g., retail, automotive, consumer packaged goods). These can be adapted to customers’ individual needs.
User & Use Cases
55 percent of Board users are planning users – slightly below the survey average of 64 percent – reflecting the fact that Board is essentially an integrated tool with strong planning but also BI and analytics functionality. This is also reflected in the area of planning use cases and other use cases. Customers leverage Board mainly for operational planning (78 percent) but also financial planning (54 percent). Here, planning takes place at different aggregation levels. Board is particularly used for budgeting (85 percent) and forecasting (65 percent). Besides planning, customers mainly use Board for standard/enterprise reporting (80 percent), ad hoc query (78 percent), dashboards/scorecards (71 percent) and data analysis (61 percent). Many respondents plan to use it for strategic planning (51 percent) and financial consolidation (41 percent) in the future.
Board targets mid-sized and large companies across all industries. 60 percent of our sample of Board customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 88 users (including 30 using planning functionality), but the mean of 138 users (78 for planning) indicates there are also several larger implementations.
Current vs. planned use (planning use cases)
N=49
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=50
Percentage of employees using Board
N=50
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=50
Total number of users per company
N=50
Planning users per company
N=50
Company size (number of employees)
N=50
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