Information Builders > Case Studies > WebFOCUS Shifts the BI Paradigm at World Wide Technology

WebFOCUS Shifts the BI Paradigm at World Wide Technology

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

WebFOCUS
Active Technologies
Oracle ERP
Oracle BI tools

Tech Stack

Oracle WebLogic Server
Linux
Sun hardware

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Industries

Electronics
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Procurement

Use Cases

Supply Chain Visibility
Predictive Maintenance
Inventory Management

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

About The Customer

World Wide Technology (WWT) is a value-added reseller and systems integrator that provides technology products, services, and supply-chain solutions. The company moves billions of dollars of equipment each year for IT hardware giants such as HP, Dell, and Cisco. WWT has become a recognized industry leader, providing its global customers with technology products, services, and supply-chain solutions. The St. Louis, Missouri-based company recently helped Dell to consolidate its supply chain – reducing costs, boosting operational efficiency, and increasing visibility and control among its partners. The efficiency of WWT’s core business is highly dependent on information technology.

The Challenge

World Wide Technology (WWT) was facing a challenge with its existing business intelligence (BI) toolset, which comprised Oracle’s Discover, Portal, and Reports solutions used in conjunction with an Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The company was also dealing with a proliferation of hand-coded reports, as business users often requested “one-offs.” This put a strain on the IT department by requiring it to support more than 1,000 individual reports and dashboards. The company needed a major overhaul of its reporting infrastructure in order to remain competitive. They envisioned a BI environment that would enable business users to build, schedule, and automatically distribute their own reports and dashboards, allowing the IT team to focus on maintaining and organizing the data.

The Solution

WWT decided to standardize on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to enable the creation of flexible self-service reporting solutions. They deployed Active Technology reports and dashboards to give individuals more autonomy and control. Active Technology reports can be downloaded and viewed within a browser, either online or offline. Users don’t need to install any software or even be connected to the reporting server to view the dashboards or to sort, summarize, and drill down into reports. WebFOCUS was clearly more flexible and cost effective than the alternatives. Because WebFOCUS can run on any platform, with any application server, and access any data, WWT’s hardware costs were much lower – outweighing core licensing costs. After training internal developers and establishing some architectural standards for the company, WWT began developing financial reporting applications.

Operational Impact

Financial analysts, sales and marketing personnel, vendor relationship teams, and others spend time analyzing data instead of compiling it.
WWT has lower inventory carrying costs, invoices get paid more quickly, and managers have better visibility into finances.
WebFOCUS has completely renovated WWT’s weekly financial reporting process.
Between 10 and 15 people on the financial reporting team now spend their time analyzing data instead of compiling it, which saves an average of eight hours each week per analyst.

Quantitative Benefit