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As a user of the M3 Marketing Investment Management solution, we hope you
find the the following information helpful.
M3 Jun '08 Release Update
The June 2008 M3 release contains numerous
feature enhancements. The list below contains several that may be of greatest interest to M3 users:
A new simplified planning interface with dynamic simulation has been
introduced to offer an alternative for those with straightforward planning
situations. With fewer complexities to manipulate, scenario input and simulation
results are displayed side-by-side with last year's information for easy
comparison and quick evaluation of potential plans. The user can directly enter absolute or percentage changes (based on the
year-ago levels) to the business drivers of interest. M3 then forecasts the volume changes and
displays them in both tabular and graphic form on the same page, as shown in the
example below. Users
can toggle between this single-page planning interface and the full set of M3
planning views by selecting Advanced Planning
or Basic Planning from the View menu.
Interactive report headers have been created to enable quick
refinement of key report settings directly from the results page, without a
round trip to the full settings view. Elements of the report's scope
(product, location, and time or named scenario) and any reporting attribute
(such as "by brand" or "by region") are available as applicable for the
different report types. In the example shown below, users could easily switch
from "ROI by account" to "ROI by brand," or from "All Products" to a specific
product group. The
report settings screen remains available to access the
full set of report parameters as required.
Y-axis formatting options have been added so that users can
manually control both the scale and label of the y-axis. The M3 graphics engine
will automatically label, fit, and scale each report, but these overrides
provide an additional degree of control for users that may want to, for example,
compare multiple elasticity reports using the same fixed vertical scale, or make
a label more specific to the particular use of the chart. Users access
this control by right-clicking on the y-axis and selecting "Format Axis" from
the context menu.
M3 Feature Spotlight
As highlighted in the previous section, it's
simple to adjust the overall scope of a given report when setting the desired
product, location, and time constraints. However, some reports may be run
using a selected scenario to establish scope. In these cases, an
additional report filter can be especially useful to further restrict the
reported information along the product, location or time dimensions. For
example, if your scenario covers the entire year, a filter would enable the user
to focus on a specific period within the year. Filters are easily defined
from the the report settings page by selecting desired elements from a
hierarchical list, as shown below.
Coming Soon
We are pleased to soon begin embedding context
appropriate help content within the M3 application. We expect that the
first elements of this will begin to appear in the next release as detailed
descriptions of each report type. In future months, additional online help
will be added to assist with individual report settings as well as within the
planning views. Watch for more information on this new capability in next
month's newsletter after its general release.
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