Hyperion Solutions Corp. Monday debuted a new release of its business-performance-management software with a new workforce-planning application and improved financial-modeling capabilities. Hyperion announced the release of Hyperion Applications Suite 4.0 at its Solutions 2005 user conference in New Orleans this week.

Business-performance management combines financial planning, forecasting, and analysis to help businesses set strategic goals, develop plans to meet those goals, and monitor and analyze the effectiveness of the plans. Market researcher IDC expects sales of business-performance-management software to grow from $1.2 billion in 2003 to $2.1 billion in 2008.

Fifth Third Bank is a long-time user of Hyperion software and financial systems. VP Bret Furtwengler says the 4.0 release will better support the bank's practice of distributing more financial decision-making authority to the managers of Fifth Third's 1,200 bank branches while maintaining centralized IT administration. The bank believes that giving local managers such authority provides a competitive advantage.

"Fifth Third is a big believer in distributed decision making, so that philosophy needs to expand to our financial planning and reporting," he says. The bank uses version 3.5 of the application suite and he expects to upgrade to the new release shortly. Fifth Third Bank operates in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Florida, Michigan, and West Virginia markets.

Hyperion Application Suite is made up of five applications: Hyperion Performance Scorecard, Business Modeling, Strategic Finance, Planning, and Financial Management. Hyperion Planning includes a new workforce-planning module to help align a company's workforce with its strategic plans.

Release 4.0 offers an improved, task-oriented user interface and a common Microsoft Office interface for all the applications. Other additions include a debt-scheduling tool and other financial-modeling capabilities, enhanced balanced-scorecarding strategy map features, and improved audit-trail functions and document links. A compliance-management dashboard, released earlier this year to help managers monitor efforts to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, also is part of the application suite.

The starting price for all five applications is around $400,000.