Diodes Inc., a Dallas-based manufacturing company, found itself with important information stored in three different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems after a multi-year acquisition spree. This led to a lack of consistency and difficulty in creating enterprise-level reports. The company wanted to improve data quality and consistency, and also acquire better enterprise reporting tools. The company's reporting problems were only the tip of the iceberg. A larger problem loomed below the surface, in the hodgepodge of databases and software applications from Oracle, PeopleSoft, IBM, Promise, and other vendors. At the time, a majority of Diodes’ reporting was accomplished through data warehouses affiliated with these enterprise applications and ERP systems.

Manitoba Hydro, a major electric power and natural gas utility in Manitoba, Canada, needed to provide extensive customer energy usage data in an interactive, visual format to assist with forecasting energy requirements. The steady increases in energy consumption due to a growing population in the province motivated the utility to acquire analytics tools so analysts could improve the accuracy of their energy forecasts. The forecasting is fundamental to many major activities at the company and it is the starting point for the corporation’s long-term decision-making. Having the data needed in an understandable, highly accessible format was essential.

Palm Coast Data (PCD) was looking to fine-tune its analytics for calls, orders, shipping, and inventory, as well as expand its analytic tools to include e-commerce dashboards. The company wanted to extend a variety of existing reporting packages with modern BI technology. PCD had acquired FulCircle, a multi-channel solutions provider, which included an application called SmartSuite based on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics technology. PCD wanted to enhance the SmartSuite environment and extend WebFOCUS into other product areas. The company aimed to create analytic dashboards that enable customers to more precisely track their fulfillment and e-commerce activities.

Spokane Teachers Credit Union (STCU) was facing a challenge of losing members through the natural process of attrition. The existing reporting system was not capable of delivering the insights the credit union needed to deliver targeted, relevant offers to its members. The credit union was using Pitney Bowes' Sagent business intelligence (BI) product for 14 years, but the product was being sunsetted. This situation presented an opportunity for STCU to implement a new BI and analytics platform. The credit union sought an easy-to-use analytics platform that could enrich their reporting and formatting, data security, scalability, and data visualization. It also needed to have strong self-service capabilities to meet the needs of more than 25 power users and 500 business users.

Toshiba Personal Computer System Corporation was facing a challenge in delivering real-time information to its management and employees due to the rapid growth of the business. Their existing information system was costly to operate, unstable, and posed security risks. The system was failing to meet the demand for real-time information, which was crucial for timely decision-making. The old system used an Access database for production, sale, and management of accounts. The system didn’t allow for late responses and limits, and only power users could utilize the data. The general user was limited to lists that someone else made. Once a download was made, the user also had to retotal everything in Excel himself. With this system, information could not be timely.

Sligro Food Group, a leading food and beverage retailer in the Dutch market, was struggling to leverage the vast amount of data it collected from its homegrown ERP system. The company's reporting strategy was fragmented, with over 700 Brio reports providing inconsistent and disjointed information. The company was operating largely on gut feeling, unable to extract valuable insights from the data at its fingertips. Sligro needed a tool to streamline and enhance its reporting strategy, providing improved insight into store sales and other aspects of the company’s operations, including finance, logistics, and marketing.

Vermeer Corporation, a leading manufacturer of industrial and agricultural equipment, was facing challenges with its data management. The company was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and standard reports from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to track business metrics. However, as Vermeer’s operation continued to grow globally, managing, monitoring, and exchanging an escalating volume of data became progressively more difficult. Critical information was stored in disconnected data silos or housed in “spreadmarts,” which led to conflicting totals in reports and IT management headaches. Company leaders sought a way to deliver useful business intelligence into the hands of people throughout the organization to support their culture of continuous improvement.

Dahl Finland Ltd., a leading wholesale supplier of HVAC, public utility, and pipe products in the Nordic and Baltic regions, was facing a challenge with its existing enterprise resource planning system (ERP). The ERP system had rudimentary reporting capabilities and was not user-friendly. This led to workers throughout the enterprise struggling to access, analyze, and view accurate and consistent business data. The company also used Microsoft Excel to generate additional custom reports outside of the IT department. These manual methods of reporting were time-consuming and generated inconsistent data. The company needed a solution that could modernize and rationalize their analytics system to deliver more comprehensive and accurate information.

Parc de Salut MAR (PSMAR), one of Spain’s leading clinical and research organizations, was facing challenges in managing, sharing, and analyzing an enormous amount of clinical data due to its continually expanding staff and rising patient volumes. The organization was heavily dependent on a legacy system that had been in active use since 1984. As clinical and administrative data continued to grow, the hospital’s home-grown reporting platform became too rigid and slow to keep up. The need for better data management, security, reporting, and analytics could no longer be ignored. It was time to pursue a qualitative leap in capabilities. PSMAR set out to acquire a general-purpose analytics platform. The project stakeholders, drawn from business and IT, envisioned a series of analytics dashboards that could produce a steady flow of key performance indicators (KPIs).

IBI Group, a globally integrated architecture, planning, engineering, and technology firm, faced challenges due to its rapid growth through acquisitions. This growth led to a diverse set of information systems, disconnected processes, and islands of information. The company's primary asset is its human capital, measured in billable time. Managers had to constantly monitor staff capacity and utilization to maximize their professional resources. However, these efforts became progressively more difficult as the company acquired numerous service organizations throughout the world. The company needed a way to quickly view consolidated information about financial activity and workforce productivity.

Kempen & Co, an independent Dutch merchant bank, was facing challenges in synthesizing new and old information into a cohesive reporting environment that simplifies account management, risk management, and financial reporting. The company was operating in a highly regulated business environment requiring constant oversight by managers. The company's activities required comprehensive reporting tools that let employees drill down into current information about customers, profitability, and myriad operational details. However, Kempen’s managers had problems accessing information from an HP Alpha OpenVMS system.

LifeWatch, a provider of remote heart-monitoring and home sleep-testing services, was faced with the challenge of complying with new governmental requirements to support new EDI standards for medical claims processing. Failure to comply would result in fines and payment delays. The company had to build integration technology to comply with the new standards by the government deadline. LifeWatch processes medical claims for devices and patient services with more than 10 different insurance claims clearinghouses, each with its own unique trading partner agreements. The company used electronic data interchange (EDI) technology to process charges using a 4010 format established by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but a recent updated HIPAA standard now requires healthcare organizations to support the EDI 5010 format.

Mount Sinai Medical Center, a 1,200-bed facility on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, needed to devise a metrics-based business that holds physicians accountable for performance and quality. They wanted to restructure the reporting environment to improve the accessibility of critical information. The challenge was to resolve information-management and data-quality issues to enable consistent reporting results. They also needed to identify and share Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) via graphical, self-service reports.

Paradies Lagardère, a retail chain operating in airports across the U.S. and Canada, was looking to streamline its business operations and merchandising procedures. The company wanted to unlock information trapped in its legacy systems and enable advanced data analysis, reporting, and forecasting. The goal was to acquire an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution that could provide consistent and timely insight into corporate performance, create more accurate forecasts, and help store managers maximize the effectiveness of promotional and merchandising strategies.

Shikun & Binui Group, a leading infrastructure and real estate group in Israel, was facing the challenge of establishing a single source of truth for financial and operational reporting and analytics that enforces consistency among autonomous business entities. The group includes seven main business activities that are involved in the financing and construction of large-scale projects, infrastructure, residential neighborhoods, commercial structures, and public buildings, both in Israel and abroad. The group's first BI project was centered on corporate-level financial and operational reporting and analytics. In addition to implementing a BI system to support consolidated financial reporting, the group envisioned a BI environment that would permit managers to monitor operational activity by day, week, month, and quarter.

ABC Financial Services, a leading provider of billing and club management solutions, was facing a challenge in providing its customers with flexible and user-friendly analytics capabilities. The company's existing system made it difficult for club owners to extract specific information about enrollment trends, cash flow, and campaign management scenarios. ABC Financial wanted to give club owners the flexibility to slice-and-dice performance metrics, but they didn’t want to burden users with a cumbersome reporting environment. ABC customers wanted more flexibility for visualizing and summarizing data.

Ace Hardware, the largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative in the U.S., was facing a challenge of managing the vast amount of information required to keep the company’s supply chain running smoothly. The company needed to extend decision-making capabilities to a large base of users via data analytics capabilities that were easy to access, integrate, and use. The company was looking for a decision-making platform that could support thousands of users while easing development and offering robust self-service capabilities. The platform needed to be 'ERP-savvy' and able to integrate various types of data into intuitive charts, graphs, and reports.

Amerisure, a leading provider of property and casualty insurance, wanted to enhance company performance by leveraging the intelligence in their enterprise data to improve profitability and foster a more analytics-driven culture. The company's data was complex and spread across disparate systems. They needed a framework that would enable them to harvest the intelligence within that data. The company also wanted to provide its agency partners with analytics about their accounts that they otherwise would not have access to. Amerisure was also looking to make these capabilities mobile to further enhance customer service and increase client longevity.

Ameritas, a company offering a wide range of insurance and financial products and services, was struggling with accessing, presenting, and analyzing key business information from a diverse back-end infrastructure. This included data from a mainframe administration system that encompasses sales, commissions, customer service, underwriting, and actuarial data. The company lacked a cohesive way to manage this data, which was crucial for making informed business decisions. Furthermore, Ameritas wanted to provide its 'information consumers' with an easy-to-use process for analyzing and retrieving information from the repository. It needed a solution that would allow access to information about company operations, products, and customers and make it accessible not only to IT professionals, but also to business users and policyholders.

As Banco Interacciones expanded, the board of directors wanted to centralize its monitoring and analysis operations via a web-based portal with an array of next-generation dashboards. The system would let managers and key stakeholders access detailed information pertaining to the bank’s activity, as well as help the commercial banking department to achieve its weekly performance goals. The bank carried out a series of initiatives to address these issues, implementing various reporting tools and dashboards, but the results fell short of expectations. As a result, the bank’s Administrative and Finance Corporate Board decided to embark on an ambitious IT project to select a business intelligence (BI) tool that could deliver this functionality.

Basler Versicherungen, a leading Swiss insurance provider, faced several operational challenges. Among them was limited visibility into the performance of the more than 650 brokers who sell its insurance products and drive more than 30 percent of the company’s revenue. Basler’s staff also lacked a complete view of customer activity, which hindered service delivery and prevented them from identifying cross-selling opportunities. The company needed to improve access to vital and timely information contained in its corporate systems. Before these new applications were introduced, employees were struggling to get the information they needed to perform their jobs more efficiently. They were forced to manually gather data from seven or more back-end systems, and then consolidate that information into Excel spreadsheets, where they could conduct further manipulation and analysis.

Cambridge Memorial Hospital, a regional hospital in Ontario, Canada, was faced with the challenge of monitoring patient volumes, costs, and quality due to new provincial requirements. The Ontario Ministry of Health introduced quality-based procedures, under which hospitals are compensated based on the number of patients they look after, the services they deliver, the quality of those services, and the specific needs of the broader population they serve. The hospital's funding is based on the number of cases performed each year. To handle this effectively, Cambridge Memorial needed to replace its outdated manual reporting system with a more efficient and comprehensive solution.

The Ministry of Alberta Seniors and Community Supports was facing challenges in providing a proactive approach to reporting and developing efficient procedures for addressing client needs. Processors had limited access to client data, which slowed down the processing of client requests. Managers also had difficulty tracking workers’ performance. The ministry was also facing internal growth and demand for its services escalated. Users at various levels of the organization needed a simple, easy-to-use interface, the power to accurately drill down through the information, and the ability to export information in a wide range of reporting formats.

Cascades, a packaging and tissue products manufacturer, was implementing SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications across its numerous mills, plants, and paper manufacturing facilities. This was part of an enterprise-wide strategy to reengineer financials, procurement, purchasing, production planning, warehouse management, plant maintenance, and other essential business functions. However, a significant challenge in this multi-year SAP deployment involved integrating the new SAP environment with the existing infrastructure. Cascades needed integration technology to monitor shop floor equipment and seamlessly move data, messages, and transactions across this complex infrastructure.

The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, a non-profit organization in Powell, Ohio, was facing difficulty in tracking expenses against budgets and understanding how campaigns and membership drives were progressing relative to annual goals. The organization lacked reports for day-to-day analysis of the operation. The zoo needed to ensure that it uses its funds appropriately and managers needed to track performance metrics for each part of the organization on a daily basis. To enable this type of real-time intelligence, the Zoo decided to standardize on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform.

Davenport University, a private, nonprofit university with 11 campuses throughout Michigan, was facing challenges in analyzing, calculating, and distributing student data from a Banner ERP system to workers with varying needs in multiple departments. The university was looking to improve student retention and reduce the time it takes to calculate financial aid awards. They needed a solution that could access, analyze, and visualize information in its Ellucian Banner ERP system, as well as report against many other internal and external data sources.

First Industrial Realty Trust, one of the largest providers of diversified industrial real estate in the U.S., faced the challenge of providing more than 175 employees with access to on-demand property management information. They needed to develop a secure BI environment that could support partners, customers, and internal staff. The company had previously implemented a business intelligence (BI) environment supported by Crystal Reports from Business Objects, but users found it difficult to export data to Microsoft Excel. To maximize employee efficiency, First Industrial decided to deploy a Web-based BI environment that could combine data from multiple systems, seamlessly integrate with Excel, and bolster reporting and analysis capabilities for end users.

The Georgia Department of Labor (GDOL) was tasked with helping unemployed citizens find gainful work. This involved offering training and support services to unemployed Georgia citizens, helping employers recruit qualified personnel, and tracking a wide variety of labor statistics for state and federal agencies. The department had to manage information for as many as 500,000 job seekers annually, connecting workers with employers and helping managers, analysts, legislators, and economists understand continually shifting labor trends. This generated a huge amount of data, which needed to be rolled up into portals that reveal the status of the state’s workforce. The department faced the challenge of tracking metrics related to employment services for job seekers and employers throughout the state, as well as delivering labor exchange statistics to federal and state agencies.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) was facing challenges in managing costs while meeting high expectations from patients for the care they receive. The organization lacked an integrated information system, and reports were not readily available for decision-makers. In addition to serving a unique population, ANTHC needed to comply with government mandates to improve patient safety and quality performance. The organization was using Microsoft Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and a Crystal Reports reporting system to access and analyze clinical and administrative data. However, these users had to manually extract data from a Cerner data warehouse and load it into Microsoft Excel tables for analysis. This lack of automation made it difficult to access or visualize data in a cohesive way.

Attenti, a company that offers electronic monitoring solutions for parolees, wanted to improve its technology to better track offender behavior. They aimed to assign compliance scores to each offender to determine whether they are improving or worsening over time. However, Attenti faced the challenge of not being an analytics company and did not want to create a homegrown software platform from scratch. They needed an analytics platform with strong data visualization capabilities that could handle the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data.