The Council of Europe, an organization that represents Greater Europe and manages a total budget of over 260 million euros annually, was facing challenges with its IT infrastructure. The Council was generating and managing a lot of information that could not be rationalized quickly enough to be used to aid business decisions effectively. The Council decided to look more closely at its IT infrastructure as well as the way in which it is managed and used by employees with a view to rationalizing and improving it. A large scale upgrade of its financial information system ensued. An RFI was launched at this time to find a BI vendor that provided an end to end solution that was easy to use on all levels of the organization and was able to be implemented within the tight deadlines imposed by the wider financial information system’s upgrade that was underway at the time.

Firma Foreign Exchange, a global firm providing international payment currency solutions, was facing challenges in streamlining the creation of secure, dynamic analytics based on current account data. The company wanted to extend data management and visualization capabilities to traders, managers, and executives. Additionally, Firma wanted to deliver customer-facing analytics to account holders to provide transactional transparency. The company's business community was generating SQL reports and creating Excel spreadsheets to examine operational data. Plus, they manually created thousands of monthly statements and e-mailed them to their customers. Firma wanted to find easier ways to access, analyze, and distribute this business information.

CWB National Leasing, Canada’s largest and longest-standing equipment financing company, needed to deliver a single version of truth spanning its most critical information sources – applications for receivables management, credit, and leasing. The company needed a solid analytics strategy to help their staff access and use data in the most efficient way possible. The company reviews 4,000 applications each month and adds 2,000 contracts each month. The company needed to track these applications and contracts efficiently.

The City of Richmond, Canada, faced a challenge with its new online community registration system, Class. While the system was efficient at tracking registration courses, accounts, and payments, it lacked the functionality to transfer financial data to community associations. This was a crucial aspect of the city's operations, as it determined how much money needed to be sent to the various community associations the city worked with. The city needed a solution that would enable seamless information-sharing between the registration and financial management systems and create daily financial reports to help finance staff manage registration payments and distribute funds to community groups.

Sunset Transportation, a logistics management and brokerage services company, was facing a challenge with its existing Tableau environment. The platform lacked the enterprise capabilities needed to elevate their analytics to the next level. The company needed a robust analytics platform that could be embedded into a larger application to provide a holistic client experience. They wanted to leverage a lot of internal and external data, and the existing BI platform was not capable of scaling to meet these needs. Sunset also wanted to deploy the new software in a cloud environment to reduce infrastructure costs and increase scalability.

Grand River Hospital, a 615-bed community hospital in Ontario, Canada, was struggling with outdated data management technology. The hospital's IM/IT environment included more than 60 source systems, and an 11-member decision-support team depended on the IM/IT department to produce reports. Team members specialized in their own specific systems, making the production of cross-segment reports especially difficult. Hospital officials wanted to pull data from all these systems into one cohesive source and facilitate timely and accurate reporting for hospital decision-makers.

Guelph General Hospital (GGH) was struggling to obtain information from a MEDITECH health information management system. It was difficult to retrieve data from the system and hard to understand its static reports. Because data was scattered across many different information systems, administrators couldn’t achieve a holistic view of each patient’s experience, let alone roll up that data to gauge overall performance or use it to monitor hospital activities. The hospital needed a solution that could integrate data scattered among multiple information systems throughout the hospital. They also wanted to be able to conduct in-depth analysis of ambulance performance, admitted patients, emergency department visits, urgency levels of admitted patients, and other hospital performance metrics that drive positive outcomes for patients.

Helzberg Diamonds, a fine jewelry retailer with 233 stores across the U.S., needed to build a robust business intelligence environment connected to a variety of data warehouse platforms. The company wanted to process and ensure the quality of huge quantities of point-of-sale (POS) data and provide up-to-date information for store managers and decision-makers. The company’s existing reporting tools were unable to seamlessly access information in a new database and make it readily available to those who needed it most. The company was spending an hour a day manually pulling data from disparate sources to create sales dashboards for regional managers. Once completed, each of those regional managers would take those dashboards, manipulate the information they contained in Excel or other formats, and distribute the results to each store manager. Every morning, 35 highly paid regional managers were spending their first hour sorting through Excel spreadsheets, a huge drain on productivity.

Insperity, a leading Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in the United States, was seeking to standardize on an in-house business intelligence solution and expand its online reporting environment for clients. The company wanted to offer intuitive enterprise business intelligence technology that would allow users to create their own report procedures and data access routines. This would also be used to develop a menu-driven reporting environment that simplifies reporting for customers and novice users. The challenge was to find a solution that could streamline operations to reduce costs, scale affordably to meet future usage demands, and improve customer service by providing expanded, standardized reporting capabilities.

The JOC Group, a provider of global intelligence for trade, transportation, and logistics professionals, was facing a challenge in providing its clients with better Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics to make critical business decisions. As the competitive landscape for data services evolved, decision-makers at JOC Group realized they needed to improve the company’s BI capabilities to preserve market leadership. They examined offerings from several software vendors and chose Information Builders for its complete spectrum of technology and services for data integrity, data integration, and BI.

Lipari Foods, a regional wholesale food distributor, was in need of a self-reporting tool that would provide employees and customers better access to transactional data. The company wanted a self-service BI environment that could provide visibility into every step of a process. Prior to purchasing Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform, Lipari’s reporting practices consisted of manual, “one-off” processes in which an IT professional created a specific report in response to a specific business request. Lacking a consistent enterprise strategy, the IT department found itself producing hundreds of unique reports. A massive amount of transactional data was available, but the company lacked self-service reporting tools that would let non-technical workers access, sort, summarize, filter, and visualize the data.

Lloyd’s of London, a leading insurance market provider, faced the challenge of implementing a cost-effective, reliable upgrade of FOCUS with minimum risk in transferring its business-critical information. In 1995, new legislation required Lloyd’s to collateralize all its letters of credit and place funds into collateral accounts. Previously, syndicates were not required to put up any cash when setting up a letter of credit. In the late 1990s, Lloyd’s began its shift to a new operating platform based on Windows XP and an ethernet. Lloyd’s also expanded its distribution chain and required a system that could generate new payment request types and settle debits and credits with brokers outside the UK. Lloyd’s saw the opportunity to evaluate the business intelligence (BI) solution market and replace its legacy system with one that best suited its needs.

MasterCard’s previous reporting tools required a detailed understanding of data, and a restrictive licensing policy that limited their extensibility to multiple business domains. The company needed to develop targeted reporting solutions for many parts of the business, enabling an unlimited set of BI assets to be delivered to employees and customers. The challenge also involved the nature of the reports that people requested. Information Builders developed a proof-of-concept (POC) to validate how its BI tools could fulfill these requirements. MasterCard especially liked WebFOCUS Active Technology, which permits people to manipulate the significant amount of data that is distributed with each report.

Maverick Transportation, one of the largest flatbed transportation companies in the U.S., was seeking more efficient ways to distribute current information, reports, and metrics throughout the enterprise. The company faced challenges such as compliance with government regulations, safety concerns, ongoing fleet maintenance requirements, and a notoriously high driver turnover rate. In an industry where margins are slim, the ability to carefully scrutinize all aspects of its business was crucial to Maverick’s success. However, Maverick’s existing reporting tools made it difficult to combine operational and financial data, hindering the company’s ability to closely monitor key activities. The company embarked on an initiative to expand its financial reporting package and evaluated several reporting and business intelligence (BI) vendors.

Life sciences companies must contend with a vast base of information and figure out how to analyze it effectively to manage sales, marketing, and distribution activities. As companies within the pharmaceutical industry seek best-practice tools and techniques in an effort to compete, demand for MiPortal® is growing – in Australia and throughout other parts of the world as well. Mercurial saw the opportunity to bring a unique set of BI capabilities to the pharmaceutical marketplace, and then to expand into other verticals as well.

Neways, a company that designs, manufactures, and sells personal care, household, and nutritional products, faced the challenge of standardizing global reporting systems and processes. The company needed to provide business analysts with a self-service BI environment and deliver critical business information to a large, dispersed network of independent distributors. The structure of the organization created unique challenges for Neways’ IT team. Internally, business analysts needed self-service reports to help monitor finances, anticipate trends, and predict results based on current insight. Externally, Neways’ enormous and globally dispersed user base of independent distributors needed access to real-time production data to support sales efforts and track qualification for monthly bonuses.

North American Lighting (NAL) was using a legacy reporting system to monitor its continuous manufacturing operations. However, when the legacy system was retired, the company saw it as an opportunity to standardize on a more versatile reporting system. The challenge was to consolidate disparate reporting tools to reduce costs and increase the number of report developers. The company needed a system that could deliver real-time data about shop floor operations as the pace of production accelerated. The IT department was tasked with migrating more than 150 legacy reports into the new environment and creating more than 100 new reports.

nVision Global, a leading provider of services for freight bill auditing and payment, logistics management, and claims processing, was looking to implement sophisticated analytics that incorporate interactive graphs and map-based reports. The goal was to provide customers with detailed information on shipping routes, rates, logistics, and carrier contracts. The company wanted to create a secure, web-based dashboard that lets customers view their logistics information online through a SaaS model. However, the existing reporting was limited and required extensive staff support. nVision wanted to take these services to the next level and make clients self-sufficient by adding more analytical functionality, better drill-down capabilities, and a more elegant user experience.

Oxford Properties Group, a global commercial real estate owner, developer, and manager, needed to upgrade its business intelligence (BI) infrastructure to simplify the demands of managing its properties. The company required advanced reporting and analysis capabilities to support its plans for global expansion. The challenge was to develop an enterprise BI solution that could deliver information from a data warehouse or production system across multiple platforms and databases. The company also needed a system that could infuse information into the daily activities of busy property managers.

Ozburn-Hessey Logistics (OHL) was facing a challenge in providing its customers with timely and accurate reporting about its performance across all its lines of business. The company had a different customer-facing web application for each of its four lines of business: freight forwarding, customs brokerage, warehousing/e-fulfillment, and transportation. Each application had a separate URL and required a unique log-in procedure. This made the reporting process time-consuming and cumbersome. OHL recognized that multiple websites and manual reporting did not represent a world-class experience. They wanted to provide customers with a user-friendly, one-stop portal that could deliver comprehensive performance information for all lines of business.

Parker Hannifin Corporation, a leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies, was facing a challenge in deriving focused, customized reports from data stored on the corporate mainframe. The company had committed itself to a corporate-wide Win Strategy – a comprehensive continuous-improvement program based on a three-tiered foundation: premier customer service, strong financial performance, and profitable growth. However, measuring the results in a quantitative way wasn’t easy as IT professionals had to supply continually updated information about the many tasks and transactions contained in the Win Strategy metrics. The company needed to create an integrated, enterprise-wide reporting environment that allows users to easily obtain customized reports based on focused subsets of data from the corporate mainframe, and other data sources in the future.

Paycor, a provider of human resource (HR) management services, wanted to give its clients a more comprehensive view of HR operations by extending existing solutions with advanced analysis and data visualization capabilities. The company sought to integrate a full-featured BI platform into its product suite, unifying data from different product databases and providing users with innovative functionality. The goal was to provide information within its application workflows to make it easier for end users.

Physicians Mutual Insurance Company (PMIC) was facing a challenge with its multiple systems used to administer its policies. The company had to go through tedious processes to extract data, store it in databases, and create custom reports for policy-owner and claims administration, financial auditing, underwriting, and other business functions. The company wanted to enable business users to address their own business intelligence (BI), reporting, and information-distribution needs without having to depend heavily on IT for custom data-access and analysis activities.

Plus Relocation Services, a company that provides domestic and international relocation services, was losing business due to its reporting shortfalls. The company lost three major contracts, which represented more than $2 million in lost revenue. The prospective clients informed Plus Relocation that the company’s reporting shortfalls were the primary reason for their decisions to select other vendors. Plus Relocation’s former customer-facing information systems lacked usability and sizzle. The company needed a business intelligence solution powerful enough to revamp the company’s information systems and flexible enough to create easy-to-use dashboards for internal and external users.

PNC Bank’s National Financial Services Center, responsible for customer inquiries and transactions, was facing a challenge in providing a more responsive and comprehensive performance monitoring system for the call center. The existing mainframe reporting system was limited and the reporting data was scattered among many different applications and databases. Scheduling alone took one full day every two weeks and the resulting hardcopy reports weren’t delivered until two or three days later. The team of Adam Silber and Aaron Leaman, Performance Metrics Analysts for PNC Bank’s National Financial Services Center, were asked to set up a highly responsive performance monitoring and reporting mechanism, both for managers and Financial Services Consultants (FSCs).

PostFinance Ltd, a leading Swiss retail financial institution, was facing challenges with its existing BI platform. The platform lacked functionality and flexibility, making reporting cumbersome and leading to a low user adoption rate. The company's existing BI tools were not embraced by the user community due to their lack of flexibility and functionality. As a result, many departments supplemented these basic BI tools with Microsoft Excel, leading to a heterogeneous BI landscape that ran counter to the information strategy and target architecture, and made system maintenance more complex.

Prym Consumer USA, one of the largest manufacturers and distributor of sewing, quilting, and craft-related products in North America, needed to interface with SAP to manage thousands of daily EDI transactions from Wal-Mart, Amazon, Michaels, and Jo-Ann Stores. The company had to replace an end-of-life electronic data interchange (EDI) system that links the company’s ERP system with its automated distribution systems. The SAP/EDI links had to be seamless as Prym's large trading partners insisted on EDI communications. Prym uses 14 different EDI message types to interact with more than a dozen trading partners. The company also needed to streamline the cycle of sending invoices and automated shipment notices.

Changes in government funding required Quinte Health Care (QHC) to cut $10 million from its operating budget. The company needed better business intelligence tools for easier access to information and analytics, so decision-makers could understand where money could be saved. The new funding approach, known as Health System Funding Reform (HSFR), comprises the health-based allocation model (HBAM) and Quality-Based Procedures (QBP). This strategy provides the government with an evidence-based method for distributing funds. Every year, healthcare takes a larger portion of the tax base and the government wants to mitigate the huge variation in care and outcomes across Canada’s hospitals. There is also a shift in fund allocation, from hospitals to community health centers and home care, as it becomes increasingly clear that people recover more quickly if they can be released from hospitals sooner and moved to another setting.

RDC inMotiv, a leading IT and business services provider for the mobility service industry in the Benelux region of northern Europe, needed to streamline the exchange of information among all the relevant players in the automotive supply chain. This entailed managing massive amounts of data from 25,000 Dutch automotive companies with 100,000 employees and more than 12 million vehicles. The organization needed to find a better way to access data from a wide variety of sources, analyze it, and mine specific information about vehicle owners and potential customers. The recent changes in the automotive market, such as the increase in internet car sales and shrinking profit margins, drove a critical need for real-time customer intelligence. Market leaders succeed by gathering as much insight as they can about their existing and potential clients, establishing long-term relationships, and carefully tracking every transaction.

Ricoh Leasing, a company that leases products such as medical equipment, industrial machine tools, and vehicles, and provides collection, loan, and financial services for these leases, was facing challenges with its data warehouse system. The system was slow, required a lot of paper, data was not being used effectively or practically and security was questionable. The field staff, who deal with many different kinds of customers, had developed their own systems for handling customer information. The data warehouse system, as it was originally designed and implemented, did not catch on with the field. The original business intelligence tool was attractive for power users, but not for most people in the field, who were used to their own different systems and did not have the time to learn a new tool that did not exactly suit their needs. To make it more accessible, the Information Systems Division switched from a client/server-based to a Web-based system. This, however, made the cost prohibitive, because licensing was based on the number of users, and with Web-based access the number of users was now potentially the whole company. The Web-based system also raised security concerns.