Avatar Solutions, a company that provides patient satisfaction, employee, and physician surveys to more than 600 hospitals and 13,000 providers, was faced with the challenge of streamlining reporting, bolstering analytics, and improving data quality. The company needed to ensure that its clients continued to receive accurate performance data as the foundation for quality improvement initiatives. The healthcare industry was rapidly evolving, and with the passage of the U.S. Affordable Care Act, an expanding array of government regulations and quality metrics began to influence Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. For example, patient satisfaction scores became a part of a hospital’s Total Performance Score (TPS), which measures how well healthcare organizations perform with respect to important dimensions of care and service – directly impacting their Medicare reimbursement dollars. These industry dynamics made it even more important for Avatar to develop flexible data management and reporting procedures.

The Bank of Montreal was facing a challenge where business analysts and managers were spending a significant amount of their time going through paper reports to collect and rekey information. The bank needed a solution that would provide managers with more timely data and better access to information. The bank was exploring ways to deliver information to managers electronically, but all of the proposed solutions had high price tags. The bank's Monthly Progress Monitor was a mainframe system that generated reports from branches across Canada. The finance department would review the numbers at the end of each month and about 10 days later, thick paper reports with balance sheets, income statements, and other reports would start to roll off the printer. Performance data for each branch would be mailed or couriered to the branch manager, while district managers would try to cull data from bundles of reports for further analysis and comparison. Those results would be available 15-20 days after the end of the previous month and often required managers to manually input data from paper reports into spreadsheets or call bank headquarters to get additional information that wasn’t in their reports.

Bolloré Logistics, a full-service logistics company, was facing challenges in maximizing its financial and operational performance due to inadequate monitoring and control of HR policies and related expenses. The company's HR expenses accounted for nearly 60% of its operating budget. However, the company lacked the ability to retrieve consistent data and efficiently track key aspects of their day-to-day operations. The financial management team could only see an overall view of HR expenses and had no way to determine how much of those costs were allocated specifically to staff salaries and other areas. HR had limited visibility into its operations and was forced to rely on Excel for generating reports and analyzing critical data, a process that was time-consuming and redundant. In addition, operational management had no monitoring of their own – they were dependent on the data provided by financial management and HR to measure their most important indicators.

Brant Community Healthcare System (BCHS) was facing challenges in reporting and data analysis due to the manual extraction of data from MEDITECH. The time-consuming process of creating Excel spreadsheets and cleaning data was not adding value to the leaders as the data was not available in a timely fashion or interpretable to inform day-to-day decision-making. Furthermore, the creation and management of reports required a minimum of two full-time employees. BCHS initially sought a way to make reporting easier. But over time, the organization realized it needed a solution that went beyond reporting, to also encompass data quality and the integration of its back-end systems.

The European capital markets have been hampered by national origins and traditions, which have resulted in high costs and inefficiencies for cross-border clearing and settlement. Each country typically has its own centralized and integrated structure, or central securities depository, to carry out this service. Handling cross-border settlements means the clearinghouse must deal with institutions that have different payment systems, message formats, and policies to handle trades. These differences have hindered market globalization. Euroclear, the world’s largest settlement system for domestic and international securities transactions, developed the Secure Settlement Engine (SSE) to consolidate five disparate processing platforms into one and provide a Common Communications Interface (CCI) to serve as the single gateway interface for clients to access all Euroclear settlement services. To develop the CCI, Euroclear needed a strong partner to build the communications network and provide secure messaging services for its clients. BT was selected as one of the key providers to facilitate two-way client communication through secure gateways.

Bulova Corporation, a leading manufacturer of watches and clocks, was facing a challenge in providing its users in sales and other areas of the business with faster, better access to vital data in JD Edwards systems. The company was looking for a way to make data from its JD Edwards systems more accessible to employees throughout the company. Sales representatives were heavily dependent on the IT team for more frequent reports about orders, invoices, and other sales-related matters. The company also faced issues with creating new customers due to the lack of automation between JD Edwards and the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. Additionally, point-of-sale reporting was a labor-intensive process, with data from various formats being compiled by hand into reports before being delivered to management.

Bunzl Australasia, a leading specialist distribution group, was facing challenges due to its heavy transaction volume and low margins which demanded high efficiency. The company's three primary business units each used different enterprise resource and planning (ERP) systems, making it difficult to obtain visibility into daily sales activity and other operational functions throughout the enterprise. This disparity in systems was hindering timely access to critical data, thus affecting the company's decision-making process.

Business Connexion, a leading provider of innovative business solutions based on information and communications technology (ICT), was facing the challenge of providing faster access to accurate data for complex reports to meet governance rules and improve efficiency. The company needed to allow users across the organization to extract information for improved customer service. As the number of clients Business Connexion supports increases, so does the pressure to maintain solid customer relationships. The company often takes calculated risks to invest in new technology solutions, but the company never gambles on the metric that matters most: customer satisfaction.

BC Housing, a provincial crown agency that develops, manages and administers a wide range of subsidized housing services throughout British Columbia (B.C.), was facing challenges in streamlining the integration of internal systems and improving data sharing with external organizations. The agency was also struggling with profiling, consolidating, and cleansing data throughout the agency for a single source of truth. The process of applying for financial assistance was not user-friendly for citizens, which was another challenge that BC Housing wanted to address. The agency was using the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform for years to determine the levels of support for housing providers and develop comparative benchmarks for monitoring financial compliance and performance. However, the agency wanted to expand its use of Information Builders technology by using iWay integration solutions to combine data from various types of internal systems into a common source and format, as well as to create direct links with external systems from BC Housing’s growing list of partners.

CDS Global, a leading provider of outsourced business solutions to publishers, direct marketers, and other types of businesses, faced the challenge of duplicating the capabilities of a robust reporting environment in a software as a service (SaaS) offering. The goal was to enable media and consumer product clients to securely access, analyze, and visualize circulation, fulfillment, and order management data via the Internet. The company wanted to improve its existing reports to enable publishers to make fast, knowledgeable decisions and manage their businesses more efficiently. The need was to provide clients with an easy-to-use, web-based reporting solution that could give them a clear view of their business metrics, for example, with charts and graphs.

CentiMark Corporation, a commercial and industrial roofing contractor, was looking to build on its successful BI strategy with new applications and an enhanced user experience. The company had previously purchased the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform from Information Builders to create and deploy a customer-facing BI portal, MyCentiMark.com. This application helped clients manage various projects across multiple locations by tracking budgets, proposals, recommendations, conditions, work in progress, job histories, and other important information. However, CentiMark wanted to further build on the success of MyCentiMark.com by expanding and modifying the environment, creating new applications for internal users, and incorporating interactive, self-service BI apps into the customer-facing application.

Central Parking System (CPS) was facing a challenge of inconsistent financial and operational reporting data. The company's management team needed a convenient way to quickly assess the performance of the business on a real-time basis. Most of the reports were static PDF files that lacked interactivity and were difficult for managers to decipher. The company leaders needed a system that could accurately view performance metrics. To achieve this management objective, CPS decided to use a business intelligence (BI) platform to create a financial dashboard that pulls information from several different data sources and presents a consistent, unified view of company activities.

Addison, Texas, a bustling town with a thriving business community, was faced with budget reductions and the challenge of managing its growing community with fluctuating and limited resources. The city's top managers and council members needed a clearer view into the financial and operational performance metrics of the city. They required real-time metrics about factors that affect Addison’s solvency, such as adhering to budgets and maintaining visibility into public safety issues, public works activities, economic development issues, the activities of the courts, and the myriad proceedings that impact the town and ensure its viability.

The City of Brampton, Canada's second-fastest-growing city, faced a challenge in managing its assets due to rapid population growth. The Public Service Accounting Board (PSAB) issued a Tangible Capital Assets (TCA) request for accurate reporting of all City assets, which was difficult due to the information being maintained in more than a dozen different asset management applications. The city's IT department had to support the information management needs of multiple projects among many departments, leading to a disparate set of applications and data sources, making it difficult to easily exchange information. They had no overarching integration strategy, no cohesive master data management (MDM) solution, and no trained staff available to remedy the situation.

The City of Cincinnati was faced with the challenge of creating a self-service reporting system that would empower nearly 1,000 users in various departments such as Finance, Waterworks, Sewage District, and other agencies to create, share, and distribute information. The city needed to enable ad hoc and standardized reporting options from the city’s intranet, devise a simple way to export certified financial data to Excel, create a parameterized reporting environment for non-technical users, and automate the selection and distribution of information by e-mail. The city was also looking to modernize its information-delivery capabilities and construct a pervasive reporting architecture.

The Houston Police Department, responsible for the safety of over 2.1 million people, was facing the challenge of providing instantaneous access to vital information to officers responding to incidents. The department had a data warehouse containing historic crime data, but the analysis of this data was complex and often redundant, as it was conducted using handwritten SQL requests or complex Microsoft Access queries. The department wanted to create a real-time crime center (RTCC) to collect critical data and push it directly to officers via their mobile devices. They also wanted to deploy a dashboard that allows chiefs and captains to better manage their districts.

The City of Irving Police Department was facing a challenge of accessing and interpreting the vast amount of data collected from their newly implemented Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems and Records Management Systems (RMS) from Tiburon, Inc. The influx of information made it clear that the department needed a more intuitive way for officers, analysts, and command staff to search the database and create timely reports. The department needed a business intelligence (BI) environment that would allow the force to rapidly obtain relevant insight about people, places, things, events, or other issues in a cohesive and understandable way.

ClaimsPro, Canada’s leading independent adjusting company, was in the midst of rapid international expansion and wanted to enhance operations through improved measurement and monitoring of key activities. However, the company’s managers were forced to rely on the IT team to build reports for them from scratch. This process was time-consuming and inefficient. The company needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that would allow non-technical users to satisfy their own information needs and provide managers with the ability to track vital metrics, such as revenue, work in progress, and quality assurance.

Coty Inc., one of the largest and most successful beauty companies in the world, embarked on a series of strategic acquisitions aimed at facilitating rapid expansion. This included the purchase of several Unilever brands, Del Labs, OPI, Philosophy, Dr. Scheller Cosmetics, and TJoy. While this activity created many new opportunities for the company, it also posed major challenges – particularly when it came to simplifying and unifying IT environments to ensure unhindered supply-chain collaboration. Coty needed to connect its environment with systems maintained by its partners, to whom the company outsources many logistics and supply-chain processes. The need for robust, enterprise-scale integration middleware first came to light when Coty acquired several popular Unilever brands. It needed to find a means of streamlining and coordinating ordering, logistics, distribution, and other mission-critical supply chain operations across both entities, so it could become a more real-time organization.

The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) was facing the challenge of consolidating justice data to create a comprehensive view of crime fighting, traffic safety, budgeting and planning, resource allocation, and other important activities that span jurisdictions. The staff was spending more than 200 hours each month collecting and compiling data from a series of siloed systems to create CompStat reports and other vital communications. They needed an easier way to integrate justice data from several internal and external sources.

Delaware County Community College (DCCC) was focused on expanding its infrastructure and investing in its science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. However, government appropriations to higher education institutions were becoming linked to performance, focusing on access, affordability, and outcomes. To support its growth and institutional effectiveness, maximize government funding, and ensure continued positive ratings from the Middle States Review, DCCC sought to create a culture of evidence and promote decision-making that is more data-driven. The college was using Microsoft Access-based reporting activities, which were not comprehensive enough for their needs.

Disc Brakes Australia (DBA) is an Australian-owned manufacturer, designer, and global marketer of after-market and original equipment (OE) disc pads and brake rotors. For many years, DBA took orders the old fashioned way: sales representatives answered calls and manually entered the orders into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. They had to field orders from across Australia’s five time zones and several overseas markets. It took several minutes to receive an order, create a pick list, process the order, and transmit the information to the warehouse for fulfillment. As business volume escalated, the call center was getting overloaded. DBA decided to automate the order entry process with a new e-commerce system, but they didn’t have an IT staff that could create such a system in-house. After evaluating proposals from systems integrators and application development firms, they asked Information Builders to design and build an order-entry system that could link to the ERP system via RESTful Web Services.

Elavon Inc., a leading provider of payment services, was struggling to consolidate about a dozen legacy reporting environments, many of which were acquired through mergers and acquisitions. Without corporate standards for creating reports and queries, it was hard to make optimal use of IT resources. Some of Elavon’s month-end reports generated a billion I/O operations and took more than six hours to run. The company had multiple month-end reporting processes running simultaneously, which pushed the old reporting tools past their maximum capacity and created performance issues that caused data quality problems.

First Rate Investments, a company that provides software and services to calculate rates of return on investment portfolios for investment advisors and financial institutions, faced the challenge of generating performance-return records for millions of accounts. This involved creating and storing more than one billion account-return records in about six hours, which works out to more than 40,000 returns computations per second. The company needed to process a high volume of portfolios in a short period of time, which was crucial for its expansion in Europe and Asia. Business continuity and resilience were of utmost importance to its clients, who needed assurance that First Rate could fulfill service-level agreements (SLAs) for high volumes of data.

Food For The Poor, the largest international relief and development organization in the U.S., was seeking an analytics environment that would permit instant visibility into its marketing database while enabling the staff to quickly evaluate direct mail and advertising campaigns. The organization needed to operate efficiently and quickly ramp up fundraising efforts in the wake of catastrophic events. The challenge was to analyze data to increase productivity, reduce operational costs, and improve the success of fundraising campaigns.

Securities America, one of the largest independent general securities brokers/dealers in the U.S., faced a challenge in servicing clients quickly and effectively due to the dispersion of necessary data across multiple tools and databases. The company wanted to create a customized analytical tool that could be both flexible and easily accessible by a variety of users. The goal was to improve the overall experience for financial advisors, branch managers, and office assistants, and in so doing, allow them to provide better service to their clients – even as they obtain a deeper understanding of their business. In addition to providing new analytic capabilities, Securities America wanted to institute enterprise-wide data governance procedures to build confidence in the analytic data and its basis in day-to-day decision-making.

Megamation, a provider of SaaS-based maintenance management solutions, needed to seamlessly access data in clients’ backend financial systems, which range from small, simple applications to large, complex ERP environments. The company's flagship offering, DirectLine, required interaction with each customer’s current finance system for orders and payment authorization. While smaller customers may have very simple systems, larger companies – such as the big manufacturers and large hospitals that comprise Megamation’s client base – have typically deployed sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments such as JD Edwards, SAP, or Oracle. The challenge was to develop a partnership that would extend the company’s flagship offering with broad-reaching data integration capabilities.

The Labor and Social Security Oversight Office (LSSOO), a department of the Employment and Social Security Ministry (ESSM) of Spain, was facing challenges with its inspection system, Integra. The system was designed to support all inspection activities but was falling short in terms of response time for reports. The back-end architecture of Integra was drawing data from the same databases as the online platform that supported the daily activities of inspectors, sub-inspectors, and support personnel. This was compromising application performance and curtailing usability. ESSM officers needed a solution that would improve the functionality and performance of Integra applications.

Houston Community College (HCC) is a public institution of higher education that serves about 75,000 students each semester. The college relies on public funding from state and local governments, which requires extensive reporting to document decisions, monitor enrollment trends, track student outcomes, and provide access to key performance indicators (KPIs). However, HCC was struggling to find an easy method of presenting academic performance information to its board members, administrators, and the public it serves. The college was looking for a business intelligence (BI) solution that could create an Academic Dashboard displaying current performance metrics through Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server as well as a public-facing website. The college also wanted to integrate disparate data sources into a cohesive data warehouse and provide administrators, staff, and board members with flexible BI solutions to drill into data.

Network Data Systems (NDS), an IT infrastructure professional and managed services firm, was facing challenges in tracking engineering resources for internal budgeting, workload planning, and billing. They also needed to enhance their reporting services to customers regarding IT environments and equipment. The company was using a manual process to report on internal business processes, including its help desk ticketing system, which was falling short. They needed a simpler and more efficient way to collect and share information about things like how many hours they work with each customer and which help desk tickets are open or closed.