Hof Hoorneman Bankers, an independent investment bank, was faced with the challenge of providing more than 500 customers with a personal digital overview of their investments on a daily basis. The bank wanted to focus on personal communications with its customers and keep them involved by providing regular insights and reporting on the status of their investments. The bank's strategy was to create a customer-facing BI environment, featuring interactive eStatements, that combines real-time and historical data from diverse sources into personalized dashboards and interactive Active PDF files.

Entertainment Promotions, a leader in the North American discounts and promotions market, embarked on an initiative to streamline and improve core business processes, simplify day-to-day tasks for its 520 staff members, and unify silos of activity across the organization. The effort, known as Project Breakthrough, involved the implementation of a variety of new software applications, including cloud-based solutions, to replace legacy systems. The company needed to maintain the availability of existing data sources as new systems were being turned on. The challenge was to ensure business continuity and information accessibility in the midst of a major technology infrastructure upgrade, which included the deployment of cloud-based systems.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC) Foundation, Division of University Advancement, is responsible for fundraising and managing all aspects of donations. The foundation faced challenges in tracking all the information about donations, contributors, and fundraising programs. The IT staff needed to supply donors and university executives with detailed information on donation amounts, contributors, progress toward objectives, fund disbursements, and more. The existing system was inefficient, with requests for new reports having a ten-day minimum turnaround. The foundation needed a solution that could provide more accurate and timely information about fundraising and donors to university leaders and relieve the IT group from creating custom reports.

AAA Ohio Auto Club was struggling with data management due to siloed operational systems. The organization was unable to use data strategically or gain a consolidated view of business operations. Managers were using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track business metrics, but it was difficult to generate a consolidated view of the operation. The organization was receiving more data and trying to review it with tools like Excel and Tableau, but they couldn't report quickly and accurately with the data. The BI licensing structure was also a challenge for them.

AcuSport, a leading distributor of outdoor and shooting sports products in the U.S., was facing challenges with its existing system of exchanging information with its vendors, retailers, and customers. The process of developing business-to-business (B2B) interfaces was becoming increasingly complicated, tedious, and time-consuming. The company's IT staff had to work with numerous order formats and network protocols to exchange documents, and create custom interfaces between the iSeries applications and a product information management (PIM) application from Stibo Systems. As business volume accelerated, the process of manually converting transaction information into the correct format for each system became inefficient. AcuSport began looking for a solution that would allow it to quickly integrate trading-partner documents with its software applications.

The telecommunications service provider market is not only saturated with offers, but also experiencing a sharp increase in the number of users with data plans, which has led to an increase in network traffic. Due to this rapid growth and escalating demand, it is becoming increasingly difficult for service providers to plan and scale network infrastructures to accommodate steady increases in data traffic. In such a competitive market, companies need to constantly improve the quality of services offered to their customers, and they are always looking for ways to optimize their offerings. Many telecommunication service providers are adopting performance management technology to better monitor, measure, and assess the performance of critical IT resources. Other providers look to big data and predictive analytics to troubleshoot incidents and events in the data center. This is all part of a steady shift from a reactive to a proactive performance management model, as service providers work to ensure greater uptime, and thus, more exceptional experiences for their customers.

Arata Corporation, a leading Japanese wholesale distributor of household products, was facing challenges with its sales reporting process. The company's sales representatives were spending a significant amount of time and effort using Microsoft Excel to create monthly sales reports for each individual retailer that does business with the company. This process was cumbersome and resulted in inconsistencies. Arata needed a way to streamline the steps involved in preparing these reports. The company sought a solution that could be used as a common sales reporting tool for all staff, automating the entire process of retrieving and summarizing sales data, and outputting the results into formatted reports and charts.

The Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) was facing a challenge with the increasing amount of data from tens of thousands of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) sessions per month. The therapists were manually entering treatment notes and progress updates into Excel spreadsheets. As the amount of data and total number of therapy hours increased, it became more difficult to generate progress reports. The organization had a pressing need for operational analytics to maximize the service each patient receives. The operations team at each center was tasked with matching patient and therapist availability to ensure that every patient receives the full amount of their medically necessary treatment. This was a difficult task that required constant monitoring of treatment utilization data.

Coastal Credit is a nationwide auto lender servicing automotive dealers in 26 states. Their primary customer base is the secondary used car market and they purchase loans made to military and civilian consumers. The company is taking on other established lenders by offering a range of digital conveniences that empower dealers to boost profitability and help consumers simplify their financial lives. The company's strategy is to use WebFOCUS to supply analytics to dealers, customers, and employees, including data about automotive buying trends, consumer loan histories, and regional lending practices. The company's vision is to create a more comprehensive digital presence for interfacing with customers, delivering insights that make auto dealers more profitable.

The New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration (DRA) was facing challenges with siloed data sources which made it difficult for staff to capture, compare, and analyze taxpayer data in support of collection and auditing activities. The agency was using more than 20 disparate tax applications to administer various taxes, maintain taxpayer information, and manage licenses. The information systems were extremely diverse and weren’t well integrated. Each system had unique search capabilities and log-in requirements. Staff spent a substantial amount of time collecting and compiling information to track where revenues were coming from, monitor taxpayer activities, analyze historical trends, and conduct future planning. The collection and auditing efforts lacked coordination and it was difficult to provide information to legislators.

Diakonessenhuis, a top Dutch hospital, was facing increasing demands for information from various stakeholders including health insurers, the press, the Netherlands Healthcare Inspectorate, and patients. Internally, the hospital needed to use information to deploy staff and resources, organize departments, and account for budgetary decisions. The rising B Segment system in the nation, which allows certain healthcare costs to be negotiable, was causing more healthcare providers to invest in cost-driven management. This required real-time access to complete and accurate data from across the facility. Previously, reports were compiled centrally once a month and if a specific question was not addressed in the report, it often took days to get the answer. This led to decisions often being based on intuition, without first consulting valid information.

Florida Atlantic University (FAU) was faced with the challenge of standardizing on a single analytic solution university-wide to facilitate reporting consistency, meet regulatory and accreditation guidelines, and improve decision-making for performance-based funding objectives. The State of Florida had adopted performance-based funding (PBF) for its public colleges and universities, replacing traditional enrollment metrics with outcome metrics such as graduation rate, employment, and student success in the classroom. FAU needed to improve and document student outcomes and measures to support its mission. The university sought to operationalize its PBF strategy and automate the complex compliance reporting scenarios necessary for performance-based funding. The university also needed to comply with Florida’s performance-based funding formulas and receive the top ranking among Florida’s public universities.

Food Lion, a major grocery retailer, was facing challenges with its mainframe-based reporting processes. The company was struggling to deliver financial information to the field in a timely manner. The hardcopy reports generated by mainframe reporting programs had to be manually bursted and stuffed into envelopes, then mailed to store managers and the operations team in the field. By the time managers received this information, it was generally more than one week old. It was also difficult to find particular bits of information, since the reports were printed in a rigid, hardcopy format. The profit and loss statements were generated by a mainframe-based reporting tool. Changes to the reports had to be requested of the IT department.

Gore Mutual Insurance Company, Canada’s oldest property and casualty insurance firm, had a diverse information landscape serving a wide range of users across the underwriting, product development, claims, finance, and broker areas. The company had many detailed reporting and data environments that were inefficient and paper-based. The data was not in any actionable format and couldn't be used in any meaningful way to get a comprehensive view of the business or to manage operations. The company relied heavily on monthly paper reports such as lists of exposures paid, claims, lawsuits, and other important information. The company's claims department extracted data from back-end systems and moved it to a data store. They created related measures, delivered as web-based reports. However, the environment was completely lacking in governance, and it only served a subset of users. Only a few super users with the appropriate skill sets could manually generate reports, so other business users had to either rely on them for information, or create their own Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables.

Haskell, a leading design-build organization in the U.S., was struggling to extract valuable data from its JD Edwards ERP system. The company found that the ERP system was only as good as the data people could get out of it. The challenge was to leverage ERP data to enhance decision-making and extend operational information into the company’s day-to-day activities. The focus was on frontline managers – delivering timely data to the people who are making tactical decisions. The company needed a toolset that would enable the IT department and business analysts to create financial and HR reports more easily. They were looking for a solution that would provide greater flexibility and ease of use, leading to a drastic reduction in the amount of outstanding IT support issues.

Hawkins, a chemical distributor, was facing challenges with its 15-year-old homegrown .NET application which was limited in its flexibility and cumbersome to use. As the company grew and added personnel in many new locations, the legacy system was becoming unmanageable. The company was constantly writing code to add new features or new users to the application. The need for an upgrade was evident, especially with the need for future technology enhancements, such as mobile access to data. The company was looking for a solution that was more efficient, intuitive, and could be leveraged by a broader base of users.

Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure, a provider of mission-critical and business-critical software solutions to governments and service providers, was facing a challenge with its data management. The company's day-to-day business runs on numerous disparate systems, including customer relationship management (CRM) applications from Salesforce.com, Siebel, multiple finance systems, and other vendors. These sources are ideal for collecting and storing data, but are challenging for business users seeking to leverage information in an actionable way. The existing systems had limited reporting capabilities, which made it difficult for the management team to gain the insights they needed into the state of the business. Hexagon needed a unified view of data from all its systems to most effectively manage its operations.

The Hillman Group, a leading manufacturer of fasteners such as nuts, bolts, screws, and washers, was aiming to improve productivity at its three manufacturing facilities and eight distribution centers. The company wanted to implement lean manufacturing initiatives, which involve scrutinizing business processes to remove waste and eliminate unnecessary effort. However, these strategies work best when information related to production, supply, and distribution can be successfully synchronized. The company was facing challenges in accessing and analyzing data from a wide variety of transaction systems, which was crucial for cutting costs and boosting efficiency throughout the organization. Additionally, Hillman previously had 14 different methods for measuring open orders, leading to inconsistencies in sales reporting and forecasts.

ICON Health and Fitness, the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of home exercise equipment, was facing a challenge in tracking and analyzing operational performance across its various companies and business units. The company's IT department was already stretched thin managing a wide range of responsibilities, and the existing ERP system offered limited BI capabilities, making it difficult to compile historical information and perform data trending. Management wanted a business intelligence (BI) environment that could provide greater insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) across the company, especially to understand how each division was performing on a weekly, monthly, and year-to-date basis, with comparisons to previous time periods and business plans. This was crucial to ensure that the company was meeting its revenue and profitability objectives.

Indaver, a leading waste-management specialist in Europe, was facing challenges in creating high-quality, detailed financial reports for management. The company was growing rapidly and had expanded to over 30 companies, making it a major player in the waste-management market. However, as the company grew, its technology requirements evolved. It had implemented SAP R/3 as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, but it lacked integrated reporting capabilities among its various offices. The company had outgrown Excel, and SAP reporting was deemed too cumbersome for managers to use for everyday decision support. Indaver needed an integrated Web-based solution that was powerful, yet easy to use. It was also important for the solution to provide a native interface to SAP, largely eliminating the need for a data warehouse.

Intelligence Ltd., a Japan-based HR consulting firm, was facing challenges with its sales reporting application. The existing system provided limited insight into customer accounts, and sales staff required more information to work with existing and potential employment clients. The sales representatives relied heavily on the Job Listing Reporting Tool to support their day-to-day tasks. However, the previous system provided only a fraction of the information they needed. For example, information about the benefits and results of ads was difficult to obtain, often taking several days to collect and compile. When sales reps couldn’t find the data they required, they often turned to the IT department, which would help by aggregating information from MS SQL Server databases and countless disparate Excel spreadsheets – and then display the results. This was a long and tedious process that could take up to several days.

Life sciences companies are faced with the challenge of managing and analyzing a vast base of information to effectively manage sales, marketing, and distribution activities. Many of these organizations have been trying to absorb, digest, and utilize all this information in Microsoft Excel, or to create unique reporting environments to meet their specific needs. The pharmaceutical industry experiences a deluge of information from many sources, including internal systems, third parties, and national government databases. IQVIA saw the opportunity to bring a unique set of BI capabilities to the pharmaceutical marketplace, and then to expand into other verticals as well.

Israeli Credit Insurance Company (ICIC) had to revamp its entire IT infrastructure within a short period of time due to ownership changes. As part of this effort, the company decided to replace its JavaTM-based reporting system with a BI environment. They wanted to be able to create new reports quickly in a structured yet flexible way. The challenge was to introduce a new reporting system that includes about 50 reports in just four months. They had to maintain the same functionality, response time, and look and feel as before, yet also give customers new capabilities.

Jack Nadel International (JNI) is a marketing and promotional products agency that specializes in brand identity reinforcement and maintenance. The Los Angeles-based company serves as an extension of its clients’ sales and marketing teams, combining creative and unique merchandising solutions with cutting-edge information technology to help companies achieve their marketing goals. The company was facing challenges with its existing information distribution system which was slow and paper-based. This was causing delays in providing critical information to administrators, sales personnel, and staff. Additionally, JNI was experiencing data quality issues due to the interface between their Lawson ERP system and a Web front end built in Domino. These issues were causing errors in orders and billing, leading to significant business disruptions.

Jobs2Web, an interactive recruitment marketing firm, was facing the challenge of transforming operational data into meaningful metrics for its client companies. The firm needed to measure and monitor the effectiveness of job marketing campaigns and channels. With thousands of open positions at any given time, some of Jobs2Web’s clients spend millions of dollars marketing their jobs via various websites, including social media sites. Most of these clients could not adequately measure and monitor the effectiveness of their recruitment efforts. Jobs2Web saw an opportunity to give clients access to something they never had before – a way to analyze the effectiveness of its recruitment efforts. The company knew that by providing data analysis tools on top of the large amounts of transactional data it was already collecting from candidates, it could create a measurement and analysis system that went above and beyond anything currently offered in the field.

Julius Zorn, Ltd. (Juzo), a leading healthcare products manufacturer, was facing challenges in enhancing customer service through improved product quality and accelerated order delivery times. The company's success strategy was based on high-quality products, first-class personalized customer service, and strict adherence to delivery dates. However, smooth and efficient processes were essential, particularly in the case of custom-made bandages or compression clothing, which needed to be delivered quickly and reliably. Juzo could not afford a shortage of resources or other weak spots within its order processing procedures. To ensure smooth operation and adherence to delivery dates, the company needed to oversee data flow throughout the entire production cycle, from consulting and order acceptance through product delivery.

L.B. Foster, a leading manufacturer, fabricator, and distributor of high-quality transportation and construction materials, faced challenges in accessing, analyzing, and presenting information in a cohesive and timely way due to its diverse software infrastructure. This included packaged applications such as a JD Edwards World enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a Sage SalesLogix CRM system, and more than 200 IBM Lotus Notes applications. As the company grew and its pace of business accelerated, the ability to access and analyze information became critical for company managers. For instance, production personnel were creating bills of materials by hand for shop floor operations, a process that took two to three hours every day. They had to extract data from JD Edwards, key it into Microsoft Excel, analyze it, print it, and distribute it.

LeanLogistics, a division of Brambles, delivers on-demand transportation management solutions (TMS) enabled by the industry’s largest transportation network. These tools automate planning, execution, settlement, and procurement functions for companies like Chiquita, McDonald’s, Nash Finch, and Otis Spunkmeyer. The LeanLogistics On-Demand TMS also provides unique functions such as inbound supplier management, appointment scheduling, benchmarking, and network-wide reporting, linking to an e-network of shippers, carriers, suppliers, and customers that share a single data and application environment. The on-demand software environment helps clients plan for carrier coverage, track inventory, and share information with partners. Even though LeanLogistics has always offered standard and custom reporting capabilities, savvy customers and increased industry competition led Bass and his team to seek out a more advanced business intelligence (BI) environment that would empower its clients to make the best use of their data. This, in turn, would boost customer satisfaction and give the company a solid edge in a highly competitive market.

The Louisiana Department of Health was faced with the challenge of creating a data strategy that identifies and links all data elements associated with each citizen/recipient, healthcare provider, and location. The department wanted to improve data integrity, analysis, and reporting by creating standard processes for data storage, movement, cleansing, enrichment, and access. The department depends on an array of applications – legacy, custom, off-the-shelf, on-premises, and remotely hosted. Each application operates as a standalone system with its own set of business rules and data. Data sharing and reporting across systems is complex and difficult. System fragmentation drives up the cost of conducting business by reducing productivity and increasing technical maintenance efforts and activities.

Marvin F. Poer and Company, a leading property tax advisor, was facing a challenge in responding to customer demands for easier access to information about the status of work on real estate, personal property, and administrative processes. The company wanted to go a step further by rolling out BI applications not only to internal employees, but also to customers. They wanted to create a customer-facing dashboard environment that delivers key business metrics about the status of real estate, personal property, and administrative processes.