Ford Motor Company, one of the world’s largest automakers, needed to help its thousands of dealers quickly identify and resolve problems with warranty repair costs. The company wanted to leverage its 15 years of historical data to mine new insights about manufacturing efficiency, supplier quality, and dealer repair trends. The challenge was to use data visualization techniques to present information in a way that general managers at each dealership could easily understand and compare their warranty repair costs to other dealers.

AutoZone, the leading retailer and distributor of automotive replacement parts and accessories in the U.S., needed to roll out a flexible analytics environment to thousands of stores without burdening field workers with custom software or complex report procedures. The company wanted to work with its existing computers, databases, and information systems to create a self-service reporting and analytics system that casual users could adopt quickly. In the past, the IT department generated most of AutoZone’s corporate reports at the Store Support Center. While these reports were adequate for monitoring basic activities, managers discovered they needed additional reporting capabilities as the company grew. They also wanted better utilities for drilling into and analyzing data. They envisioned an analytics environment that could reveal operational metrics on demand, while also serving users in the field.

Worldpay, a payment processing and technology provider, needed new reports, dashboards, and analytics capabilities to leverage its expanding big-data lake and related resources. The company discovered that many of its customers want to analyze their transaction level payment data and it has marshaled substantial resources to facilitate these requests. From the world’s largest retailers to small mom-and-pop merchants, Worldpay is leading a transformation in the payments industry. The company has nearly 800,000 merchants and processed 23 billion transactions last year. To improve its pricing capabilities, Worldpay’s Data and Analysis Insights team use WebFOCUS to visualize and populate domain-specific objects from a Hadoop data lake. Their big-data environment, which utilizes a distributed storage architecture, has lowered the cost of managing transaction data from more than $6,000 per terabyte to about $500 per terabyte.

Medline Industries, a global manufacturer and distributor of healthcare products, faced the challenge of developing a self-service analytic environment that would provide workers with an accurate view of every aspect of the business. This included inventory management, plant capacity, labor, and finance. The company needed to streamline business processes and deliver analytics and audit tools to ensure ongoing efficiency and profitability. The challenge was to track thousands of products and dozens of distribution centers as part of a worldwide supply chain, which involved a lot of moving parts and an extraordinary amount of data.

Air Canada, the largest airline in Canada, was seeking to improve its services by making it easier for consumers and corporate customers to purchase, book, and manage travel, as well as track all associated expenses through a self-service reporting portal. The challenge was to build an online reporting environment that was simple enough for customers to use, yet sophisticated enough to handle sensitive corporate data in a secure, reliable way. The company also wanted to extend powerful BI capabilities to its premier customers. The IT department was tasked with this project, which had to be completed outside of the usual IT channels.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) had been collecting data on criminal activity for many years. However, the department relied on a manual process of sifting through 13 disparate data sources to analyze crime statistics, identify trends, and model resource allocations. This process was inefficient and time-consuming, making it difficult for the department to make sense of all the information. Users typically had to run multiple queries to be able to drill into the data and answer specific questions. CMPD command staff recognized the need for improvement and sought funding through an Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Homeland Security Grant. During the RFP process, they asked the chief, line officers, and other personnel what they wanted to see from an information system and what types of information they wanted to provide to officers in the field. Based on this feedback, they established guidelines for the project and sought proposals from technology vendors.

The Co-Operative Bank, a UK-based bank with over 3 million customer accounts, was facing a challenge in providing fast, accurate, and easy-to-read reports for distribution via email to its 19 business centres across the UK. The bank's operations are run out of these regional Corporate business centres, which manage the Bank’s core corporate customers. Therefore, it was essential for these centres to have timely access to accurate information that would affect decisions made on both individual accounts and across the wider customer base. The bank had been using Information Builders’ FOCUS product to create mainframe reports. However, the system did not provide a distribution process for the Bank- once created the reports had to be taken offline, sent to be printed and then packed and shipped to the relevant departments. This could take up to five days from running the job to end users receiving the output.

BBVA, a global financial institution, faced the challenge of summarizing the activity of 700 auditors in 13 countries in a small number of dashboards and reports. They needed to consolidate operational data from internal audit activity into an accurate source of information. The internal audit department was seeking autonomy from the IT department. They had been using a Microsoft Excel reporting solution that generated balanced scorecards to summarize audit team performance, but that solution did not scale well. As the number of scorecards increased, more manual intervention was required, which taxed the resources of the IT department and the internal audit team. In addition to issues with the Excel solution, rapid company expansion motivated BBVA’s senior management team to streamline the company’s global auditing operations.

Cardiac Surgery Associates (CSA) was facing a challenge with its siloed environment comprised of diverse systems which made it difficult to generate reports about the state of its medical business. As the number of patients grew, the ability to deliver accurate information to stakeholders became crucial to providing elite service. Business administrators were forced to spend countless hours compiling information from various sources, then manually enter it into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. CSA’s technology infrastructure is comprised of numerous disparate data sources that lacked integration. This setup presented many obstacles when it came to combining data for the purposes of reporting and analysis.

The Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) was faced with the challenge of improving crime prevention by integrating information from over 27 diverse sources and making it readily available to law enforcement officers. The department aimed to take a proactive approach to policing by forming a Law Enforcement Resource Center (LERC) to promote the efficient sharing and analysis of current crime data. However, before any information sharing and analysis could take place, KCPD needed to bring together and streamline data from more than 27 sources.

Jefferson Regional Medical Center, the fourth largest hospital in Arkansas, was overwhelmed by the immense amount of information it had to manage. This included administrative data on hospital operations and various types of patient information. The challenge for clinicians and administrators was to quickly hone in on specific information. Maximizing reimbursements, analyzing payer mixes, tracking admissions trends, and monitoring staff productivity all required accurate information, delivered to the right place at the right time. However, getting information in a timely fashion was often a hit-and-miss prospect. Most of the hospital information systems offered standard reports, but it was difficult to obtain precisely what each user needed. This led to a lot of custom reporting, which dominated the available hours of the IT staff.

Tata Steel, one of the world's largest steel producers, was facing a challenge in empowering its users with timely, comprehensive information on customer-order and steel-production processes. The data was drawn from various disparate sources including SAP, Oracle, and other systems. The company was following a manufacturing methodology called 'Theory of Constraints' which involved identifying limiting factors standing in the way of achieving production goals, and then systematically improving those constraints until they no longer posed a bottleneck. However, the company needed a way to identify these constraints that affect manufacturing efficiency. Furthermore, the company had many different reporting systems with little standardization, leading to multiple versions of the truth.

The City of Charlotte, North Carolina, lacked a centralized repository for managing physical and mailing address information. This deficiency led to duplicate or erroneous address records that created additional challenges with service delivery. Inaccurate address information was able to creep into databases whenever a name was misspelled or a duplicate address was entered. City staff members often discovered address anomalies but there was latency involved in resolving the data issues and updating the associated databases. All of these data quality issues cost money by requiring extra resources for resolution.

Globalvia, a global infrastructure concessions management company, faced the challenge of consolidating and structuring business data from 29 diverse and geographically dispersed concessions to maximize management efficiency. The company manages concessions in seven countries, including highways, railways, hospitals, and ports, each with different management criteria. There were no defined roles and responsibilities and no governing data policy. The company needed to consolidate data and define its processes to facilitate a corporate transformation. Globalvia developed the Prometheus project to chart a course for unifying and standardizing processes, systems, and corporate culture. This project led to the Delphi technology initiative to facilitate an organization-wide transformation. The project’s stakeholders set out to develop a single management model based on innovation, with higher quality data for improved internal processes and better decision-making. They wanted to establish a model that could detect trends and make it easier to determine the profitability of their concessions.

Lipari Foods, a regional wholesale food distributor, was facing a challenge as it was consolidating its warehouse operations from five facilities to two. The construction of a new $40 million facility necessitated a system that could provide real-time visibility into warehouse operations. With over 30,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and 200 new items arriving every week, the company needed to optimize operations, ensure just-in-time delivery, and meet and exceed service-level agreements (SLAs). Traditional bar and pie charts couldn't provide the real-time visual analytics required. Additionally, the company wanted to improve visibility into sales activities by unifying fragmented sales data.

OEC Group, a global leader in the logistics and supply-chain industry, needed to expand its basic EDI integration infrastructure to include many types of electronic messages and formats including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, e-mail, Fax, XML, JSON, Excel, and other structured and unstructured data formats, as well as paper documents of all types. Prior to implementing iWay, developers at OEC Group hard-coded individual interfaces for each customer and supplier. This was laborious and expensive to develop new integrations. The company also needed to comply with the Canadian e-manifest program, which requires all carriers, freight forwarders, and importers to send advance commercial information about their shipments electronically to the Canada Border Services Agency. The data has to be processed before a shipment is ever loaded onto boats or planes, meaning the documents must be present at the port of departure before the government will allow goods to be loaded.

Rosnet, a provider of SaaS-based restaurant management solutions, faced the challenge of helping restaurant operators improve profitability and drive internal efficiencies. They needed to provide accurate data to analyze food costs, labor costs, and many essential service metrics. The company aimed to create a customizable, self-service BI portal that delivers analytics and insights for internal and client use. The challenge was to ensure that the IT team no longer had to spend time creating, modifying, and customizing reports for clients and that restaurants could easily access metrics on operational efficiency and profitability.

Taylor University, a non-denominational Christian liberal arts college, was looking to improve operational and financial performance by gathering data about various campus activities such as recruiting, marketing, fundraising, registration, and institutional research. The university was reliant on student tuition for its institutional budget and as discount rates rise across the industry, operational efficiency was needed to meet bottom-line revenue goals. The admissions department, in particular, faced the challenge of processing an inquiry pool of 50,000 prospective students to fill about 500 enrollment spots. The university needed a predictive analytics tool that would allow them to strategically target inquiries to improve marketing, recruitment, and enrollment.

IFDS clients lacked self-service reporting and analysis tools that could visualize disparate data in a meaningful way. In many instances, clients had to hire a third-party firm to translate raw transaction data into a format that was useful for reporting and analysis. IFDS set out to eliminate the need for third-party solution providers by providing business intelligence (BI) tools that its clients can use themselves. To achieve this transformation and create a dashboard-driven environment for reporting and analysis, IFDS used technology and services from Information Builders.

Mark Anthony Group, a leading alcoholic beverage company in Canada, was facing challenges in streamlining the flow of information governing order entry, warehouse management, billing, and shipping/receiving operations within the company and to external partners. The company wanted to extend enterprise resource planning (ERP) automation from headquarters to the warehouse to keep the entire workflow electronic. However, even after implementing Microsoft BizTalk Server to exchange communications across its extended organization, the ability to quickly and seamlessly share information between its ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) systems continued to pose quite a challenge.

OFS Brands, a leading supplier of contract furniture, was facing a challenge with its reporting process. The company used to send standard reports to its sales force via email. However, these reports were not interactive and did not allow for ad hoc queries, data visualization, or drill-downs. If a sales representative needed specific information, they would have to request the IT department to develop a custom report. This process was not efficient and put a heavy load on the IT department. The company wanted to give the sales team more control and reduce the custom reporting load on the IT department.

Brotherhood Mutual, an insurance company that works exclusively with churches and related ministries, was facing the challenge of devising a cohesive enterprise reporting strategy without going through a lengthy data warehouse development effort. The company was running its business on an IBM iSeries platform and depended on Lotus Notes for many of its workflow and Web applications. However, the platform's RPG-based reporting tools were not sufficient for the company's needs. Business users had to wait for a data warehouse to be completed before they could start using the reporting tools, and they could only access dated information that was periodically staged to the warehouse. This approach also put a heavy burden on the IT group, which had to conduct massive database development projects.

Cetera Financial Group, one of the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer/RIA firms, wanted to increase revenue by providing powerful technology offerings to its independent financial advisor network with an emphasis on enhanced reporting. The company wanted to offer visually rich financial reports and industry-leading practice management tools that enable advisors to be extremely responsive to clients. The challenge was to find a business intelligence (BI) solution that could pull data from multiple back-end systems in a cohesive way, with advanced graphing, scheduling, and report-distribution capabilities, with only one or two clicks required to access important content.

Chrome River, a company that provides software products for expense management, needed to integrate a robust reporting solution in a lightweight, web-based deployment model. They wanted to establish flexible pricing to complement a subscription-based SaaS model. The company was looking for a powerful, flexible, easy-to-use analytics framework that could be embedded in their SaaS platform. They also needed a solution that could support their security and multitenancy requirements.

Dialysis Clinic, Inc. (DCI) was facing significant challenges due to the wide diversity of its information sources. Operations related to general ledger, fixed assets, accounts payable, cash management, budgets, financial auditing, cost reports, and payroll were each supported by disparate information systems. This environment made it difficult for DCI stakeholders to track and measure important variables that offer insight and answer questions about how workers and departments spend money. For example, if DCI’s average cost per treatment increases, is it because fixed costs for drugs and nursing services are rising or because its clinics are treating fewer patients? Answering this kind of question might require accessing data from the inventory, payroll, and various medical systems – a cumbersome process that often requires IT intervention.

SWBC, a diversified financial services company, was facing a challenge due to its various distinct applications and data sources. These disconnected silos of information made it nearly impossible for the company to establish consistent customer records. They also had complex information management needs as they processed information from customers, partners, and other financial stakeholders. The company needed to combine data from a legacy accounting system and a variety of AS/400 applications to create consistent customer records. It also needed to process information related to mortgage originations, private mortgage insurance, loan payments, balance requests, and other day-to-day transactions.

FirstCare Health Plans was facing a challenge due to its reliance on two different claims systems and data warehouses, disparate reporting systems, and a lack of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for finance, in-patient care, sales, pharmacy, and other functional domains. The company was experiencing a growing volume of claims that required manual intervention due to the expansion of its membership with new plans for the Texas Health Insurance Exchange. The company was looking for a solution that would not require an increase in internal staff members to support the growing workload.

Rural Computer Services (RSI) is part of Caja Rural Group, the leading outsourcing institution for 72 rural banks in Spain. RSI differentiates itself with a deep understanding of each customer’s unique business needs. The shifting needs of end users, coupled with variations in global banking standards, recently required RSI to rethink the way people access and use information. When the results of an annual customer satisfaction survey revealed dissatisfaction with the bank’s existing business intelligence (BI) environment, RSI decided to provide better access to accurate financial information via a new, more intuitive set of BI dashboards. The organization selected Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to modernize its data processing capabilities. Garrido and other IT leaders wanted to create a BI system that could integrate information from new and old sources and simplify access to existing applications. They also wanted to create an interface to devices and permit users to both enter and retrieve information through graphical dashboards and reports. Bank managers throughout the network needed a deeper understanding of key financial metrics to speed up decision-making.

Bridgewater Bank, a Canadian chartered bank based in Calgary, Alberta, was facing a challenge with its reporting system. The bank was dealing with an influx of data from various parts of the enterprise, including finance, operations, marketing, regulatory, core banking, and mortgage lending. The existing reporting environment was inconsistent and lacked the ability to drill into the data or visualize it on interactive displays. This led to conflicting terminology in reports, causing confusion and misinterpretation. The bank needed a new analytic system that could encourage collaboration, help managers monitor KPIs, and enforce consistency in the data shared among business units.

CSG Systems International, a leading provider of customer care and billing solutions for the communications, entertainment, and field services industries, recognized the need for its clients to have easy, direct access to data to remain competitive and become more efficient operators. The company sought to unlock the value of its clients’ data with Information Builders’ business intelligence (BI) and analytics WebFOCUS platform. CSG Vantage BI, the company’s centralized data repository, does a great job capturing and consolidating transactions from various data sources. However, CSG sought to further unlock the value of client data using WebFOCUS to provide interactive reports, scorecards, and other visualization offerings. With the Vantage BI solution, clients tap into their data to obtain the knowledge they need to keep their businesses running smoothly.