Link Market Services (LMS) faced the challenge of producing over 4,000 complex internal and client ad hoc and management reports every day from two Oracle transaction databases containing up to 1.8 billion rows of data. The company needed a solution that could deliver rapidly, as they wanted to be independent from a competitor as soon as possible. The solution had to be able to connect to a wide variety of data sources and consolidate information into a single report. The company also required a solution that could produce reports as soon as a client comes on board, and deliver these reports instantly.

Friends University, an independent institution offering traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate programs, was facing a challenge in managing two distinct business models for traditional and non-traditional course schedules. The university was operating via two distinct business models, making the need for current, accurate information incredibly urgent. The IT department at Friends was struggling to meet administrators’ increasing demands for custom reports. The legacy reporting tool offered only rudimentary security and ad hoc query functionality, which meant most departments depended on IT to run their reports. The university reviewed BI packages from Argos, Oracle, Cognos, and Microsoft before selecting Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform.

Heartland Financial, a multibank holding company, was growing rapidly through the acquisition of small regional banks. This led to a jumble of disparate information systems and data repositories, making it difficult to create consistent reports. Compliance and audit teams frequently experienced continuity issues, and reports from different departments using the same data sometimes had conflicting totals. Business users were sidetracked verifying the accuracy of the data rather than using it to help customers resolve problems. Regulatory challenges were putting a much greater emphasis on day-to-day analytics and reporting. The board of directors needed consistent monthly and quarterly basis for sound operational decision-making.

Online businesses across various industries are constantly battling online fraud. The challenge is to combat this fraud without compromising the consumer experience with obtrusive technology. iovation, a company based in Portland, Oregon, aims to protect online businesses and their customers against fraud and abuse. It also identifies trustworthy customers through a combination of advanced technologies known as device identification, shared device reputation, device-based authentication, and real-time risk evaluation. To provide customers with greater visibility into fraudulent actions, and to differentiate itself from its competitors, iovation recently extended its fraud prevention solutions with powerful analytics and business intelligence (BI) functionality from Information Builders.

Lutheran Life Communities, a non-profit senior living organization, was facing administrative challenges due to its rapid growth. The company's data was spread across seven disparate information systems, making it difficult for directors and department heads to obtain a unified view of the business and access the information they required to support day-to-day decision-making. The company sought a business analytics solution that could consolidate information about daily operations and present it to business users in an actionable way.

The Ministry of Public Administration of Mexico (MPA) was facing a challenge of low quality in public works projects related to roads, schools, parks, and other public facilities. The agency identified a need for a more comprehensive way to audit and control public works projects. They decided to create a business intelligence (BI) and data integration environment that could link several public information systems, create a consolidated and trusted source of project information, and present results on demand through interactive reports and dashboards.

Moneris Solutions, a leading credit card technology merchant-processing company in Canada, wanted to provide value-added services to its merchants by allowing them to view their debit, Visa, and MasterCard transaction data online. The company also wanted to empower its employees with self-service access to vital information. The challenge was to use business intelligence (BI) to create a self-service web application so customers can obtain a customized view of card payment activity, and access consolidated statements and reports via the Internet. The company also aimed to deploy self-service applications in various internal departments.

Murphy-Hoffman Company (MHC) was facing challenges with its manual B2B processes, particularly in the exchange of common business documents such as purchase orders and parts catalogues. The purchase-order process was governed by an RPG program, which built a flat file and sent it to Caterpillar, one of its leading parts suppliers, via FTP. Caterpillar parsed the file and used e-mail to relay individual orders to its dealerships. Each Caterpillar supplier had to manually rekey the purchase-order information and fulfill the order, and MHC often lost track of the order status details. In other instances, MHC representatives had to phone Caterpillar to request parts from inventory, keeping customers waiting for as long as 20 minutes to determine availability. MHC wanted to use XML and Web technologies to streamline the parts-ordering process by automating the exchange of purchase orders and related business documents.

Niemann Foods Inc., a regional retail store operator with approximately 100 stores in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, was battling for market share in the Midwest with a number of national and regional retail operators. With $650 million in annual sales, Niemann’s goal was to be a $1 billion company. This aggressive growth strategy drove the company’s senior managers to purchase Information Builders WebFOCUS, a business intelligence (BI) and analytics environment that delivers vital information to people at every level of the organization. The company was looking to develop an operational reporting environment that tracks sales activity, gross profits, and the movement of products. The retailer’s pervasive vision for end-user reporting entrusts business users with manipulating data, rather than requiring the IT department to continually develop reports in response to each request.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (NCFB) was facing several challenges. The company was using a manual process of writing COBOL batch programs to move data from one platform to another. This process was labor-intensive and consumed mainframe cycles, making the mainframe unavailable for ad hoc query and reporting activities. NCFB wanted to make claims and payment information available via the Web and reduce the load on mainframe information systems. The company also wanted to work with compressed DB2 data. To address these challenges, NCFB decided to build a data warehouse that could be periodically refreshed from the mainframe DB2 data. The warehouse, residing on a Microsoft Windows NT platform, would always be available for live queries, thus sparing the mainframe the arduous task of fielding ad hoc requests.

Plex Systems Inc. is a developer of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud, a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for the manufacturing enterprise. The company's customers had to create reports in an SQL programming environment, which was not user-friendly. They needed a better way to empower users to access, analyze, and visualize ERP data. The challenge was to find a solution that could be easily integrated into the Plex Manufacturing Cloud and would allow users to create their own business intelligence environments, complete with customizable portals, dashboards, and a wide variety of reports.

Queensway Carleton Hospital (QCH) was struggling to comply with Canada’s performance-based funding model. The staff needed self-service analytic dashboards that could correlate information from diverse sources. The hospital was under increased financial pressure due to Canada’s performance-based funding system. This payment model rewards physicians, hospitals, and medical groups for meeting quality and efficiency measures, while penalizing poor outcomes, medical errors, and runaway costs. Complying with these funding requirements involves analyzing hospital processes, reviewing patient outcomes, identifying areas for improvement, and predicting patient trends. The hospital needs to be able to easily access, combine, and analyze a broad array of data to determine how much funding it will receive. To meet these and other information management requirements, QCH used to have four full-time employees focused solely on creating and managing reports. Yet even with that sustained effort, it was difficult to obtain accurate clinical data that revealed what was happening in the emergency room and other cornerstone programs, such as childbirth, geriatrics, mental health, rehabilitation, and medical and surgical services.

RBC Royal Bank, Canada’s largest bank, needed to provide real-time loan status information to its asset-based lending (ABL) customers. The major difference between asset-based lending and traditional commercial lending is control. The asset-based lending group at RBC focuses its due diligence on understanding the makeup and status of the borrower’s collateral so the bank can maximize the borrower’s margin availability based on the underlying value of its current assets, accounts receivable, and inventory. This involves a daily or weekly analysis, the results of which must be available to lending managers and customers at all times. Several major software vendors provide ABL solutions that perform these calculations. However, while the ABL application RBC uses has a Web-based reporting interface for this purpose, IT professionals at the bank were reluctant to use it because of concerns about security. In order to use the vendor’s solution, critical customer data – which RBC always keeps behind its firewall – would have to be copied to the vendor’s servers, opening up the possibility for substantial confidentiality risks.

Renown Health, a healthcare leader in northern Nevada, faced a challenge in accessing statistical and financial information to understand the factors impacting productivity and the bottom line. Administrators, department managers, and other leaders needed this information to enforce accountability, control staff positions, comply with state regulations, and negotiate with physicians and provider groups. The organization also faced difficulties in using SAP BusinessObjects for financial reporting, which led to the need for a more efficient solution.

The Michigan State Police Department (MSPD) was facing a challenge in accessing vital criminal, incident, and activity data from a variety of disparate sources. The department wanted to make it easier and more consistent for commanders and other headquarters staff to access this information. The data was inconsistently retrieved and analyzed across the department, with some users relying on Crystal Reports, others on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The department wanted to promote uniformity in what information was accessed and how it was viewed and compared.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) is tasked with providing public assistance programs, services, and resources to Oklahoma’s most needy and vulnerable residents. With an annual operating budget of $700 million and $1.4 billion in annual distributions to citizens, OKDHS has massive reporting requirements. On one hand, it must generate reports that verify compliance with federal regulations and program requirements. On the other, it must manage caseloads for thousands of employees supporting tens of thousands of residents. The agency needed a reporting system that would help them to make strategic decisions by supplying compliance information in response to federally mandated regulations, and help caseworkers and supervisors to efficiently manage a dynamic case load.

The Oklahoma State System of Higher Education needed a better way to present metrics about student activities in conjunction with a national initiative called Complete College America (CCA). The agency had collected a wealth of data from public and private colleges in the State of Oklahoma. It previously analyzed the data using SQL procedures and Excel spreadsheets, but the output was restricted to rigid printouts and standard reports. To meet federal, state, and institutional demands for measuring progress, they needed a better way to share this insight with a broad base of constituents, from state legislators to college chancellors.

Yellow Pages, a leading media and marketing solutions company in Canada, was faced with the challenge of harnessing big data to provide advertisers with a simple, intuitive way to access and analyze information about their digital marketing campaigns. The company had to manage more than 20 TB and 52 billion rows of data. The goal was to create a scalable, high-performance, customer-facing application that allows advertisers to perform deep analysis of results.

The Police and Border Guard Board (PBGB) of Estonia faced a challenge as their data warehouse grew to contain information on 150,000 misdemeanors and more than 30,000 criminal offences. The analysts were tasked with automating data quality procedures. The team wanted to minimize the accrual of inaccurate data so that police reports and procedures would be consistent and correct. Bad data can impact each level of the organization and lead to inaccurate decisions regarding how resources are allocated, public order is maintained, and police procedures are conducted. For example, an incorrect date or time field can lead to an inaccurate evaluation of work performance.

Conestoga College, a public college based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, was looking to create a hands-on curriculum that brings modern analytic tools and practices into healthcare and other industries. The college administrators, while collaborating with healthcare industry partners, determined it would be wise to emphasize studies on business intelligence (BI) and analytics in a more strategic and direct way. The challenge was to expose students to data analysis, management, and visualization in real-world environments.

AcuSport, a leading distributor of hunting and shooting products, was facing challenges with its existing system for exchanging business documents with partners and integrating its internal information systems. The company was using custom interfaces to exchange item information, pricing updates, inventory status, purchase orders, and other documents. As business volume increased, developing these interfaces became increasingly complex and time-consuming. The company was also using a packaged electronic data interchange (EDI) system from Gentran that was cumbersome and expensive. AcuSport was looking for a solution that would allow it to quickly integrate trading-partner documents with its software applications.

Adif, a railway systems administrator based in Madrid, Spain, manages enormous amounts of information from various sources. The organization had hundreds of applications within the organization, with the same kind of information repeated in different systems. This complicated the information-collection process and created confusion and inaccuracy. Adif needed a solution that would provide a single point of access to information from various systems and applications. The organization wanted to build a centralized, Oracle-based data warehouse and use robust BI to provide company-wide reporting and analysis against that information.

Ainsworth, a heating, ventilation, electrical, and mechanical services contractor, was struggling with the rigidity of canned reports from its JD Edwards ERP system and a lack of flexibility in its development tools. This was not satisfying users’ constant requests for information. The company needed a solution that would make it easier for developers and end users to create reports, manipulate data, and share information in the company’s ERP system. The company wanted to construct a data warehouse using ERP transaction data, and then build user-friendly dashboards that deliver real-time information about the business.

AJ Logistics, a premier provider of custom warehousing and logistics services, needed to enable its clients to simultaneously track multiple projects, obtain status updates, issue commands, and initiate complex workflows via mobile devices. The company operates in a highly competitive market and must differentiate itself by delivering superior service and support to its clients. This includes keeping them fully informed of the status of their projects by allowing them to easily monitor deliveries, inventory, and other critical activities. The company processes 1,000 to 2,000 projects every year and needed to streamline the execution of many simultaneous projects.

Alpha Bank, one of the largest financial services companies in Greece, found itself vulnerable during the global economic downturn. The bank needed to retain liquidity and preserve good banking relationships with its largest customers, while also responding to daily requests from regulators at the Central Bank of Greece. However, the MIS department was spending an inordinate amount of time accessing information and generating reports using Microsoft Access and Excel. The manual system for creating reports involved consolidating information from 40 different information systems into Microsoft Access databases, and then creating ad hoc reports and financial statements. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, with the team spending more time looking for data rather than gaining insights.

Apollo Vredestein, a Dutch tire producer, was facing the challenge of producing a consolidated reporting system that could convey data from a multitude of sources in a consistent way. This was to simplify reporting, analytics, and information delivery throughout the enterprise. The company had a best-of-breed IT strategy, using a combination of packaged and homegrown systems to meet its business needs. However, this made it difficult to achieve a single, consolidated view of critical information for decision-making purposes. The company needed a solution that could address this challenge and provide a comprehensive business intelligence platform for reporting, analyzing, and presenting business information.

Appvion, a manufacturer of paper coating and chemical products, was facing issues with information access and quality. Different departments were using different tools and data, leading to inconsistencies and a lack of governance over data usage and sharing. Information was scattered across numerous applications, warehouses, marts, and spreadsheets. The company was in search of a single platform that could meet the needs of all its departments and users, support its data warehousing strategy, preserve data quality, and enable robust analytics.

Aqua Clara, a leader in the water delivery industry, was facing challenges with its main operating system which only covered sales operations management. If partner companies wanted to aggregate and/or analyze information from a certain viewpoint, they needed to obtain the data in CSV format and process it manually. Most of the company’s partners are small businesses that cannot afford technicians to handle data processing. Additionally, these cumbersome aggregation and analysis processes were a huge drain on Aqua Clara’s resources. Monthly sales reports from partners were printed and distributed in hard-copy formats, so data needed to be rekeyed into the main system to generate related reports. Results were typically not available until, at the earliest, half a month later – a delay that negatively impacted the company’s ability to provide advice and guidance to its partners.

Associated Food Stores (AFS) was facing the challenge of eliminating haphazard, inaccurate one-off reports. The IT staff was burdened with dealing with individual requests for information, which was not only time-consuming but also costly. The company wanted to reduce the cost of providing relevant data to users and automate analytics, report development, and information distribution. The existing system was causing confusion about which numbers were accurate as users loaded the results into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to further manipulate the data. The company was also dealing with inconsistencies throughout the organization due to the use of multiple reporting technologies.

Associated Wholesalers, Inc. (AWI) is a cooperative food distributor that provides flexible business and retail services to promote the growth and profitability of its member stores. AWI began in the late 1950s to help a group of independent grocers compete with larger chains, but now serves thousands of retailers and earns close to $2.5 billion in revenue. AWI buys, warehouses, and resells grocery items to its members and offers a wide variety of programs and services to help them run their businesses. Independent retail stores that buy into the co-op earn dividends from AWI’s profits; enjoy greater purchasing power; and benefit from AWI’s distribution, marketing, and reporting services. AWI offers retail pricing systems, advertising programs, and point-of-sale business intelligence (BI) solutions based on each store’s transaction logs, which AWI loads into its reporting environment every day. Given that grocers are continually driven by a “freshness factor,” AWI has to provide its clients with up-to-the-hour data in order to deliver valuable insight. Ultimately, the company’s search for a BI environment capable of handling this challenge led Morton and his team to deploy Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI and iWay Software integration solutions to supply accurate data and insight to its members.