Arbitron is focused on helping media companies, advertisers and marketers understand media audiences and how to reach consumers more effectively. Its services and software identify marketplace trends and opportunities, which it turn, translate to company growth. To help manage and meet its unique budgeting and forecasting needs, Arbitron required a highly customizable and scaleable business analytics solution.

“We selected Applix over other vendors’ offerings because of its flexibility and technology advantage,” said John Kelly, manager, business analysis, Arbitron. “For example, with Applix we are able to update our financial plans in real time, rather than having many hours of lag between updating assumptions and details and the delivery of a consolidated result to management. As we roll the system out across the business, we expect to glean cost and revenue opportunities through more timely and more focused delivery of financial and operational data.”

“Leading companies such as Arbitron need a single high-performance platform with components that are all integrated to meet their highly agile business model,” said Ben Plummer, vice president, marketing and strategic alliances, Applix, Inc. “Applix is a perfect fit for the nimble company, providing on-demand access to fresh data throughout its operations, immediate what-if scenarios and reports for all levels of users, and rapid configuration and extension of solutions into multiple departments.”

Working Links helps the long-term unemployed retrain and get back to work, and plans to utilize Applix’s TM1 to model and forecast the performance of its training programs and prepare financial budgets accordingly. Applix’s TM1 will help facilitate decision-making by finance and operational staff, spread over several administrative locations throughout the country.

With the help of Applix partner Coheris InfoCat, the roll out of stage one is planned for late July 2006, and Working Links will then build an application to model costs and income, helping them compete with other commercial organizations and bid for contracts to run employment programs.

Announcing the choice of Applix, Working Links’ Financial Controller Paula Miller explained: “Working Links’ needs are complex — our organization is growing and we are running many more programs that are tailored to local employment situations. TM1 will help us meet new information demands, giving us the ability to respond to competitors and adjust to changes in our organization.”
“Working Links is partly owned by central Government, meaning that our standards of accountability and reporting are very high. Applix TM1 enables us to report quickly and accurately while building realistic forecasting models,” Miller continued.
Martin Richmond-Coggan, VP of EMEA at Applix, commented, “TM1 is virtually the only solution that can meet Working Links’ needs for complex modeling, fast recalculation, flexible reporting and low cost of ownership. This combination of TM1′s capabilities enables businesses to reduce planning and forecasting time and effort, emphasize analysis of their business, streamline their operations, and improve the bottom line.”

Applix TM1
Applix’s TM1 is a complete performance management application, delivering strategic business planning, budgeting, reporting and analytics for powering analysis of financial, operational, sales, employee and other business data. Applix customers worldwide use TM1 real-time response, adaptability, easy-to-use interfaces, and low total cost of ownership, and a majority realize a 100 percent return on their Applix investments within
the first six months deployment. The annual BPM Partners “Beyond the Hype” Webcast (http://www.bpmpartners.com/events_webinars.shtml) for 2006 recognized that Applix TM1 customers had the highest level of satisfaction of any of the leading BPM solutions, suites, tools and vendors. The OLAP Survey 5 (http://www.survey.com/olap) gave TM1 the highest marks for speed of query, deployment, and data load and pre-calculation, as well as the highest ranking for overall business benefits achieved and the lowest number of technical problems.
About Working Links
Working Links was founded in 2000 specifically to address the issues facing long-term unemployed people in a way that is both innovative and consistent with the Government’s Welfare to Work policy.

Working Links is the country’s first Public, Private Voluntary company, its shareholders include: the Governments Shareholder Executive, the voluntary company, Mission Australia, Manpower PLC, the country’s leading recruitment company and Cap Gemini.
Working Links operates in many of Britain’s most disadvantaged communities delivering over 60 contracts including the running of Eight Government Employment Zones.
For more information, see Working Links at http://www.workinglinks.co.uk.