UNICOM® Systems Inc. has announced the release of Focal Point™ version 7.4. Focal Point™ is a comprehensive portfolio planning solution that market-driven teams can use to make collaborative, objective decisions to deliver products, projects and services offering the highest customer and business value. Focal Point™ reduces the complexity of managing information from various sources such as emails, documents and spreadsheets and provides a collaborative centralized environment for requirements, products and project data.

Focal Point™ version 7.4 introduces key functional enhancements in the area of data visualization, business rule based workflow development and Kanban based agile planning.

New Tree-Table View

The new view combines the usability of the tree view and the table view and helps to visualize the tabular layout of element attributes where the elements are arranged in a parent-child hierarchy. Parent-child hierarchy can be static when the parent folder attribute is used or dynamic when nested grouping of attribute values are used.

Configurable Kanban Board

Focal Point™ Version 7.4 comes with a new custom chart plug-in that can be used to create Kanban boards in views and home pages. A Kanban board for agile project management can be used to visualize the flow of work, limit the work in progress (WIP) and manage the flow of work. Style and information shown on each Kanban card, as well as the attributes used for the workflow, can be customized.

Custom Business Rule API

With the introduction of the new business rule API, customers can now create their own custom business rules and deploy them into their Focal Point™ instance. Business rules can be useful for the following tasks: automation of workflows, triggering of mails and aggregation or roll up of information from lower level to higher level. They can be scheduled to run at a specific time point or at a change of attribute value.

New Parallel Coordinates View

Focal Point™ Version 7.4 introduces a new feature to visualize and manage the relations (linked elements) between multiple modules in a project. Users can specify each axis (module) that should be part of the visualization layout. This view provides the ability to create and delete links between the elements of multiple modules and can be used as a single page for visualizing and managing links in a project management workspace that contains projects, features and business needs.

Focal Point™ Version 7.4 comes with added support for Oracle 18c as an application database and Windows 16 as an application platform and includes other customer enhancements as well.

Focal Point™, along with System Architect®, is a key player in the Enterprise Architecture and Product Portfolio Management domains, helping customers make strategic decisions at the enterprise level and provide increased business value at delivery.