Suppliers > United States > Information Builders

Information Builders

Overview

HQ Location United States	Year Founded 1975	Company Type Private	Revenue $10-100m
Employees 1,001 - 10,000	Website Open website	Twitter Handle @infobldrs

Company Description

Information Builders is a global trusted leader in business intelligence, analytics, and data management solutions. Its fully-integrated platform empowers organizations to make smarter decisions, strengthen customer and supplier relationships, and drive efficiency growth.

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Case Studies.

Ford Motor Company: Leveraging Data Visualization for Warranty Repair Costs

Ford Motor Company, one of the world’s largest automakers, needed to help its thousands of dealers quickly identify and resolve problems with warranty repair costs. The company wanted to leverage its 15 years of historical data to mine new insights about manufacturing efficiency, supplier quality, and dealer repair trends. The challenge was to use data visualization techniques to present information in a way that general managers at each dealership could easily understand and compare their warranty repair costs to other dealers.

AutoZone Shifts Into High Gear With Big Data Analytics

AutoZone, the leading retailer and distributor of automotive replacement parts and accessories in the U.S., needed to roll out a flexible analytics environment to thousands of stores without burdening field workers with custom software or complex report procedures. The company wanted to work with its existing computers, databases, and information systems to create a self-service reporting and analytics system that casual users could adopt quickly. In the past, the IT department generated most of AutoZone’s corporate reports at the Store Support Center. While these reports were adequate for monitoring basic activities, managers discovered they needed additional reporting capabilities as the company grew. They also wanted better utilities for drilling into and analyzing data. They envisioned an analytics environment that could reveal operational metrics on demand, while also serving users in the field.

Worldpay Obtains Big Payback on Big Data Analytics

Worldpay, a payment processing and technology provider, needed new reports, dashboards, and analytics capabilities to leverage its expanding big-data lake and related resources. The company discovered that many of its customers want to analyze their transaction level payment data and it has marshaled substantial resources to facilitate these requests. From the world’s largest retailers to small mom-and-pop merchants, Worldpay is leading a transformation in the payments industry. The company has nearly 800,000 merchants and processed 23 billion transactions last year. To improve its pricing capabilities, Worldpay’s Data and Analysis Insights team use WebFOCUS to visualize and populate domain-specific objects from a Hadoop data lake. Their big-data environment, which utilizes a distributed storage architecture, has lowered the cost of managing transaction data from more than $6,000 per terabyte to about $500 per terabyte.

Medline Extends Self-Service Analytics Throughout the Enterprise

Medline Industries, a global manufacturer and distributor of healthcare products, faced the challenge of developing a self-service analytic environment that would provide workers with an accurate view of every aspect of the business. This included inventory management, plant capacity, labor, and finance. The company needed to streamline business processes and deliver analytics and audit tools to ensure ongoing efficiency and profitability. The challenge was to track thousands of products and dozens of distribution centers as part of a worldwide supply chain, which involved a lot of moving parts and an extraordinary amount of data.

Air Canada Soars With Web-Based FlightTracking Application

Air Canada, the largest airline in Canada, was seeking to improve its services by making it easier for consumers and corporate customers to purchase, book, and manage travel, as well as track all associated expenses through a self-service reporting portal. The challenge was to build an online reporting environment that was simple enough for customers to use, yet sophisticated enough to handle sensitive corporate data in a secure, reliable way. The company also wanted to extend powerful BI capabilities to its premier customers. The IT department was tasked with this project, which had to be completed outside of the usual IT channels.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD Fights Crime With Predictive Analytics

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) had been collecting data on criminal activity for many years. However, the department relied on a manual process of sifting through 13 disparate data sources to analyze crime statistics, identify trends, and model resource allocations. This process was inefficient and time-consuming, making it difficult for the department to make sense of all the information. Users typically had to run multiple queries to be able to drill into the data and answer specific questions. CMPD command staff recognized the need for improvement and sought funding through an Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Homeland Security Grant. During the RFP process, they asked the chief, line officers, and other personnel what they wanted to see from an information system and what types of information they wanted to provide to officers in the field. Based on this feedback, they established guidelines for the project and sought proposals from technology vendors.

The Co-Operative Bank UK Bank Provides Accurate Reporting Across Business Centres

The Co-Operative Bank, a UK-based bank with over 3 million customer accounts, was facing a challenge in providing fast, accurate, and easy-to-read reports for distribution via email to its 19 business centres across the UK. The bank's operations are run out of these regional Corporate business centres, which manage the Bank’s core corporate customers. Therefore, it was essential for these centres to have timely access to accurate information that would affect decisions made on both individual accounts and across the wider customer base. The bank had been using Information Builders’ FOCUS product to create mainframe reports. However, the system did not provide a distribution process for the Bank- once created the reports had to be taken offline, sent to be printed and then packed and shipped to the relevant departments. This could take up to five days from running the job to end users receiving the output.

WebFOCUS Improves Performance for BBVA’s Global Audit Department

BBVA, a global financial institution, faced the challenge of summarizing the activity of 700 auditors in 13 countries in a small number of dashboards and reports. They needed to consolidate operational data from internal audit activity into an accurate source of information. The internal audit department was seeking autonomy from the IT department. They had been using a Microsoft Excel reporting solution that generated balanced scorecards to summarize audit team performance, but that solution did not scale well. As the number of scorecards increased, more manual intervention was required, which taxed the resources of the IT department and the internal audit team. In addition to issues with the Excel solution, rapid company expansion motivated BBVA’s senior management team to streamline the company’s global auditing operations.

WebFOCUS Unifies Data for Cardiac Surgery Associates

Cardiac Surgery Associates (CSA) was facing a challenge with its siloed environment comprised of diverse systems which made it difficult to generate reports about the state of its medical business. As the number of patients grew, the ability to deliver accurate information to stakeholders became crucial to providing elite service. Business administrators were forced to spend countless hours compiling information from various sources, then manually enter it into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. CSA’s technology infrastructure is comprised of numerous disparate data sources that lacked integration. This setup presented many obstacles when it came to combining data for the purposes of reporting and analysis.

Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) Case Study

The Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) was faced with the challenge of improving crime prevention by integrating information from over 27 diverse sources and making it readily available to law enforcement officers. The department aimed to take a proactive approach to policing by forming a Law Enforcement Resource Center (LERC) to promote the efficient sharing and analysis of current crime data. However, before any information sharing and analysis could take place, KCPD needed to bring together and streamline data from more than 27 sources.

Jefferson Regional Medical Center Cures Information Overload Syndrome with WebFOCUS

Jefferson Regional Medical Center, the fourth largest hospital in Arkansas, was overwhelmed by the immense amount of information it had to manage. This included administrative data on hospital operations and various types of patient information. The challenge for clinicians and administrators was to quickly hone in on specific information. Maximizing reimbursements, analyzing payer mixes, tracking admissions trends, and monitoring staff productivity all required accurate information, delivered to the right place at the right time. However, getting information in a timely fashion was often a hit-and-miss prospect. Most of the hospital information systems offered standard reports, but it was difficult to obtain precisely what each user needed. This led to a lot of custom reporting, which dominated the available hours of the IT staff.

Tata Steel Forges Supply Chain Connections With WebFOCUS and DataMigrator

Tata Steel, one of the world's largest steel producers, was facing a challenge in empowering its users with timely, comprehensive information on customer-order and steel-production processes. The data was drawn from various disparate sources including SAP, Oracle, and other systems. The company was following a manufacturing methodology called 'Theory of Constraints' which involved identifying limiting factors standing in the way of achieving production goals, and then systematically improving those constraints until they no longer posed a bottleneck. However, the company needed a way to identify these constraints that affect manufacturing efficiency. Furthermore, the company had many different reporting systems with little standardization, leading to multiple versions of the truth.

City of Charlotte Addresses Data Deficiencies With iWay

The City of Charlotte, North Carolina, lacked a centralized repository for managing physical and mailing address information. This deficiency led to duplicate or erroneous address records that created additional challenges with service delivery. Inaccurate address information was able to creep into databases whenever a name was misspelled or a duplicate address was entered. City staff members often discovered address anomalies but there was latency involved in resolving the data issues and updating the associated databases. All of these data quality issues cost money by requiring extra resources for resolution.

Globalvia Drives Transformation and Growth Processes via WebFOCUS

Globalvia, a global infrastructure concessions management company, faced the challenge of consolidating and structuring business data from 29 diverse and geographically dispersed concessions to maximize management efficiency. The company manages concessions in seven countries, including highways, railways, hospitals, and ports, each with different management criteria. There were no defined roles and responsibilities and no governing data policy. The company needed to consolidate data and define its processes to facilitate a corporate transformation. Globalvia developed the Prometheus project to chart a course for unifying and standardizing processes, systems, and corporate culture. This project led to the Delphi technology initiative to facilitate an organization-wide transformation. The project’s stakeholders set out to develop a single management model based on innovation, with higher quality data for improved internal processes and better decision-making. They wanted to establish a model that could detect trends and make it easier to determine the profitability of their concessions.

Lipari Foods Keeps It Fresh: Visual Analytics Modernizes Operations and Automates Supply Chain

Lipari Foods, a regional wholesale food distributor, was facing a challenge as it was consolidating its warehouse operations from five facilities to two. The construction of a new $40 million facility necessitated a system that could provide real-time visibility into warehouse operations. With over 30,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and 200 new items arriving every week, the company needed to optimize operations, ensure just-in-time delivery, and meet and exceed service-level agreements (SLAs). Traditional bar and pie charts couldn't provide the real-time visual analytics required. Additionally, the company wanted to improve visibility into sales activities by unifying fragmented sales data.

OEC Group Automates Logistics With iWay

OEC Group, a global leader in the logistics and supply-chain industry, needed to expand its basic EDI integration infrastructure to include many types of electronic messages and formats including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, e-mail, Fax, XML, JSON, Excel, and other structured and unstructured data formats, as well as paper documents of all types. Prior to implementing iWay, developers at OEC Group hard-coded individual interfaces for each customer and supplier. This was laborious and expensive to develop new integrations. The company also needed to comply with the Canadian e-manifest program, which requires all carriers, freight forwarders, and importers to send advance commercial information about their shipments electronically to the Canada Border Services Agency. The data has to be processed before a shipment is ever loaded onto boats or planes, meaning the documents must be present at the port of departure before the government will allow goods to be loaded.

Rosnet Enhances SaaS Platform With Embedded Profitability Analytics

Rosnet, a provider of SaaS-based restaurant management solutions, faced the challenge of helping restaurant operators improve profitability and drive internal efficiencies. They needed to provide accurate data to analyze food costs, labor costs, and many essential service metrics. The company aimed to create a customizable, self-service BI portal that delivers analytics and insights for internal and client use. The challenge was to ensure that the IT team no longer had to spend time creating, modifying, and customizing reports for clients and that restaurants could easily access metrics on operational efficiency and profitability.

Taylor University Manages Student Recruiting With WebFOCUS RStat

Taylor University, a non-denominational Christian liberal arts college, was looking to improve operational and financial performance by gathering data about various campus activities such as recruiting, marketing, fundraising, registration, and institutional research. The university was reliant on student tuition for its institutional budget and as discount rates rise across the industry, operational efficiency was needed to meet bottom-line revenue goals. The admissions department, in particular, faced the challenge of processing an inquiry pool of 50,000 prospective students to fill about 500 enrollment spots. The university needed a predictive analytics tool that would allow them to strategically target inquiries to improve marketing, recruitment, and enrollment.

International Financial Data Services Builds Customer Equity With WebFOCUS

IFDS clients lacked self-service reporting and analysis tools that could visualize disparate data in a meaningful way. In many instances, clients had to hire a third-party firm to translate raw transaction data into a format that was useful for reporting and analysis. IFDS set out to eliminate the need for third-party solution providers by providing business intelligence (BI) tools that its clients can use themselves. To achieve this transformation and create a dashboard-driven environment for reporting and analysis, IFDS used technology and services from Information Builders.

iWay Keeps Information Flowing for Mark Anthony Group

Mark Anthony Group, a leading alcoholic beverage company in Canada, was facing challenges in streamlining the flow of information governing order entry, warehouse management, billing, and shipping/receiving operations within the company and to external partners. The company wanted to extend enterprise resource planning (ERP) automation from headquarters to the warehouse to keep the entire workflow electronic. However, even after implementing Microsoft BizTalk Server to exchange communications across its extended organization, the ability to quickly and seamlessly share information between its ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) systems continued to pose quite a challenge.

OFS Brands Equips Mobile Users with Analytic Dashboards on Any Device

OFS Brands, a leading supplier of contract furniture, was facing a challenge with its reporting process. The company used to send standard reports to its sales force via email. However, these reports were not interactive and did not allow for ad hoc queries, data visualization, or drill-downs. If a sales representative needed specific information, they would have to request the IT department to develop a custom report. This process was not efficient and put a heavy load on the IT department. The company wanted to give the sales team more control and reduce the custom reporting load on the IT department.

Building a Reporting Community at Brotherhood Mutual

Brotherhood Mutual, an insurance company that works exclusively with churches and related ministries, was facing the challenge of devising a cohesive enterprise reporting strategy without going through a lengthy data warehouse development effort. The company was running its business on an IBM iSeries platform and depended on Lotus Notes for many of its workflow and Web applications. However, the platform's RPG-based reporting tools were not sufficient for the company's needs. Business users had to wait for a data warehouse to be completed before they could start using the reporting tools, and they could only access dated information that was periodically staged to the warehouse. This approach also put a heavy burden on the IT group, which had to conduct massive database development projects.

Cetera Financial Group

Cetera Financial Group, one of the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer/RIA firms, wanted to increase revenue by providing powerful technology offerings to its independent financial advisor network with an emphasis on enhanced reporting. The company wanted to offer visually rich financial reports and industry-leading practice management tools that enable advisors to be extremely responsive to clients. The challenge was to find a business intelligence (BI) solution that could pull data from multiple back-end systems in a cohesive way, with advanced graphing, scheduling, and report-distribution capabilities, with only one or two clicks required to access important content.

Chrome River, a company that provides software products for expense management, needed to integrate a robust reporting solution in a lightweight, web-based deployment model. They wanted to establish flexible pricing to complement a subscription-based SaaS model. The company was looking for a powerful, flexible, easy-to-use analytics framework that could be embedded in their SaaS platform. They also needed a solution that could support their security and multitenancy requirements.

Dialysis Clinic, Inc. Heals Financial Reporting Ailments With WebFOCUS

Dialysis Clinic, Inc. (DCI) was facing significant challenges due to the wide diversity of its information sources. Operations related to general ledger, fixed assets, accounts payable, cash management, budgets, financial auditing, cost reports, and payroll were each supported by disparate information systems. This environment made it difficult for DCI stakeholders to track and measure important variables that offer insight and answer questions about how workers and departments spend money. For example, if DCI’s average cost per treatment increases, is it because fixed costs for drugs and nursing services are rising or because its clinics are treating fewer patients? Answering this kind of question might require accessing data from the inventory, payroll, and various medical systems – a cumbersome process that often requires IT intervention.

SWBC Gains Insight From Consolidated Customer Data

SWBC, a diversified financial services company, was facing a challenge due to its various distinct applications and data sources. These disconnected silos of information made it nearly impossible for the company to establish consistent customer records. They also had complex information management needs as they processed information from customers, partners, and other financial stakeholders. The company needed to combine data from a legacy accounting system and a variety of AS/400 applications to create consistent customer records. It also needed to process information related to mortgage originations, private mortgage insurance, loan payments, balance requests, and other day-to-day transactions.

FirstCare Health Plans Uses WebFOCUS to Manage Rapidly Growing Business

FirstCare Health Plans was facing a challenge due to its reliance on two different claims systems and data warehouses, disparate reporting systems, and a lack of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for finance, in-patient care, sales, pharmacy, and other functional domains. The company was experiencing a growing volume of claims that required manual intervention due to the expansion of its membership with new plans for the Texas Health Insurance Exchange. The company was looking for a solution that would not require an increase in internal staff members to support the growing workload.

Rural Computer Services Optimizes Information Management With WebFOCUS

Rural Computer Services (RSI) is part of Caja Rural Group, the leading outsourcing institution for 72 rural banks in Spain. RSI differentiates itself with a deep understanding of each customer’s unique business needs. The shifting needs of end users, coupled with variations in global banking standards, recently required RSI to rethink the way people access and use information. When the results of an annual customer satisfaction survey revealed dissatisfaction with the bank’s existing business intelligence (BI) environment, RSI decided to provide better access to accurate financial information via a new, more intuitive set of BI dashboards. The organization selected Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to modernize its data processing capabilities. Garrido and other IT leaders wanted to create a BI system that could integrate information from new and old sources and simplify access to existing applications. They also wanted to create an interface to devices and permit users to both enter and retrieve information through graphical dashboards and reports. Bank managers throughout the network needed a deeper understanding of key financial metrics to speed up decision-making.

Bridgewater Bank Makes Business Intelligence an Inside Job

Bridgewater Bank, a Canadian chartered bank based in Calgary, Alberta, was facing a challenge with its reporting system. The bank was dealing with an influx of data from various parts of the enterprise, including finance, operations, marketing, regulatory, core banking, and mortgage lending. The existing reporting environment was inconsistent and lacked the ability to drill into the data or visualize it on interactive displays. This led to conflicting terminology in reports, causing confusion and misinterpretation. The bank needed a new analytic system that could encourage collaboration, help managers monitor KPIs, and enforce consistency in the data shared among business units.

CSG Systems Delivers Better Insights Using WebFOCUS

CSG Systems International, a leading provider of customer care and billing solutions for the communications, entertainment, and field services industries, recognized the need for its clients to have easy, direct access to data to remain competitive and become more efficient operators. The company sought to unlock the value of its clients’ data with Information Builders’ business intelligence (BI) and analytics WebFOCUS platform. CSG Vantage BI, the company’s centralized data repository, does a great job capturing and consolidating transactions from various data sources. However, CSG sought to further unlock the value of client data using WebFOCUS to provide interactive reports, scorecards, and other visualization offerings. With the Vantage BI solution, clients tap into their data to obtain the knowledge they need to keep their businesses running smoothly.

Data Migration Helps Diodes Inc. Generate Consistent Reports

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

Manitoba Hydro Powers Energy Forecasting With Self-Service Analytics

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

Palm Coast Data Gains an Analytic Edge With WebFOCUS

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

STCU Visualizes Data to Improve Member Services

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

Toshiba Finds Profit in WebFOCUS

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

WebFOCUS Feeds Sligro Food Group With Information

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

Vermeer Extends Self-Service Analytics to Business Experts With WebFOCUS

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

Dahl Digitizes the Enterprise From Traditional Reporting to Modern Analytics

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

Parc de Salut MAR Improves Patient Outcomes and Reduces Costs With WebFOCUS

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

IBI Group Gains Consolidated View of Globally Dispersed Enterprise

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

Kempen & Co Standardizes on WebFOCUS

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

LifeWatch Automates Healthcare Claims Processing With Integration

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

Mount Sinai Medical Center in Good Shape With WebFOCUS

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

Paradies Lagardère Shops Enhances RealTime Merchandising Strategy

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

Shikun & Binui Group Unveils BI and Analytics Portal for Operational Agility

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

ABC Financial Gets Quick Results With Information Builders

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

Ace Hardware Remodels With Information Builders’ Guided Self-Service Analytics

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

An Innovative Analytics Vision Becomes a Reality at Amerisure

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

Ameritas Leverages Pervasive Analytics to Transform Business

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

Banco Interacciones Achieves Peak Performance With WebFOCUS

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

Basler Versicherungen Expands Its Use of WebFOCUS

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

Cambridge Memorial Hospital Meets Case Costing Requirements With WebFOCUS

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

BI Improves Services for Those In Need

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

Cascades Standardizes on iWay for Justin-Time Operation

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

Columbus Zoo and Aquarium Gains Consolidated View of Business Operations

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

Davenport University Advances Students With Analytics

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

First Industrial Realty Builds Self-Sufficiency With Enterprise Business Intelligence

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

Information Builders Helps Georgia Citizens Get Back to Work

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

Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium Delivers a Single Version of the Truth With WebFOCUS

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

Attenti Improves Rehabilitation Options for Criminal Offenders

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

Axicom Boosts Engineering Productivity With Self-Service Analytics

Axicom, Australia’s leading provider of independently owned wireless infrastructure, was facing a challenge in combining data from on-premises and cloud-based business applications to create cross-platform portals, dashboards, and reports. The company was using a JD Edwards ERP system and a new asset management system called Siterra. However, they needed an analytic platform that could span both on-premises and cloud-based information systems. They also needed an integration environment that could enable real-time and batch integrations between JD Edwards and the Siterra applications to avoid duplication of effort and potential inconsistencies in the data.

Boise Cascade Cuts Through the Analytics Backlog

Boise Cascade, one of North America’s largest producers of engineered wood products and plywood, faced a significant challenge in their operations. The company had poor visibility into millions of dollars in annual rebates and lacked the ability to visualize data from sales, production, inventory, and other key business functions. The company also wanted analytics capabilities to more accurately track more than $30 million in annual rebates that the company pays out to its customers and dealers. Accountants were using an Excel-based system for tracking the rebates and couldn’t get fine-grained analytics to determine if the rebates provided actual value to everyone involved. The company needed a solution that would provide them with the necessary insights and analytics to improve their operations.

Curtiss-Wright Helps Nuclear Power Plants Prepare for Regulatory Inspections

Curtiss-Wright’s previous reporting environment, based on Microsoft .NET, could not provide clients with the information and visualizations they needed. Requests for custom reports sometimes took days to fulfill. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) library is very difficult to navigate, and it’s not conducive to the kinds of research that these power plants want to do. They had pressure from competitors who offered analysis and reporting capabilities that they couldn’t match. They selected WebFOCUS because it has a nice way of visualizing information and a flexible environment for developing and embedding analytic applications in their SaaS solutions. Information Builders also offered implementation capabilities to help them build a new analytic portal.

WebFOCUS Gives Millennium bcp Better Decision-Making Capabilities

Millennium bcp, Portugal’s largest privately owned bank, needed to modernize, automate, and create a process for generating key performance indicators (KPIs) for comprehensive management reporting. The bank wanted to minimize decentralized reporting activities within individual lines of business and establish standard calculation methodologies for KPIs. This would ensure consistency in reports throughout the enterprise while providing for clean, accurate, and usable information across the various lines of business. The overriding goal was a lofty one: to boost awareness of how each employee contributes to the bank’s profitability. The bank also wanted to ensure high levels of user adoption, so the new dashboards would need an attractive design, an efficient layout, and comprehensive data-gathering and drill-down capabilities.

Using Analytics to Thrive in Volatile Financial Markets

Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) needed to comply with international accounting standards and lending guidelines, which required continual monitoring of lending activity, liquidity, and cash flow by business sector, region, timeframe, and other variables. The bank faced tough lending standards and conservative guidelines for capital reserves. As an international finance institution, NIB had to ensure that it complied with regulations. NIB also tracked its lending activity by business areas, such as energy and environment; infrastructure, transportation and telecom; industries and services; and financial institutions and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Officers in the Treasury and Risk departments used WebFOCUS to analyze liquidity as they monitored the inflow and outflow of funds by sector, time period, portfolio, and other variables. An InfoApp computed liquidity buffer survival horizons – projections of financial liquidity based on current and expected lending activity.

Sparta Systems Launches Advanced Reporting and Analytics Management Tool

Sparta Systems, a leading provider of quality management software (QMS) solutions, was facing a challenge with its TrackWise QMS. The system lacked an enhanced analytics module, making it difficult for users to perform ad hoc analysis. Some customers resorted to using Excel for this purpose, but the volume of data often became overwhelming. Others used their organization’s own business intelligence (BI) tools to create their reporting and analysis, but they typically relied on the IT department to develop complex SQL scripts to locate, extract, and reassemble data. Sparta Systems sought an embedded BI platform that would allow for end-user reporting, data visualization, and analysis.

St. Luke’s University Health Network Drives Decisions With Data

St. Luke’s University Health Network was facing a challenge of obtaining a single, consolidated view of critical information due to diverse sources of data. This was affecting their clinical, financial, and operational analysis. The organization needed a solution that would allow stakeholders to gain insights across all mastered data domains and cover the full continuum of patient care. The requirements for this BI/EDW initiative included improving clinical quality, reducing costs, improving patient experience, building market share, and fostering success under value-based reimbursement models. The entire team was committed to increasing self-service reporting capabilities for end users and replacing a legacy warehouse and BI system.

WebFOCUS and iWay Automate User Reporting at Toppan Interamerica

Toppan Interamerica, a division of Toppan Printing, a $16 billion corporation based in Tokyo, was facing challenges with its reporting processes. The small IT staff was burdened with a steady stream of report requests, and employees often had to wait two days or more to obtain information about sales, accounting, production, and other key business activities. The company was still performing most financial and production reporting manually. The IT staff could barely keep up with the reporting demands of their old systems. They needed to make some changes in their reporting environment if they were to adequately support the information management needs of the business going forward.

SEMARNAT Uses WebFOCUS to Encourage Protection of Natural Resources

The Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) in Mexico was tasked with managing the country's environmental and natural resource policy. However, the agency faced challenges in integrating, processing, analyzing, and distributing environmental information from its network of offices to meet the demands of internal and external users. Most of SEMARNAT's environmental analytics efforts were performed manually, using print publications to disseminate figures, images, and maps with relevant environmental information. This process was cumbersome and inefficient, leading SEMARNAT to realize the need for a solid business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform.

Los Angeles County Uses WebFOCUS to Manage Compensation for 100,000 Employees

The County of Los Angeles, one of the largest regional governments in North America, faced a significant challenge in managing the compensation and benefits for its approximately 100,000 employees. The county’s previous reporting tools required nightly data dumps and custom coding, which limited analysts’ ability to respond quickly to requests for information. This was particularly problematic when dealing with labor negotiations with state and national labor unions, which represent approximately 80 percent of the county’s workforce. The county needed a more efficient and effective way to extract, analyze, and visualize the immense amount of data involved in managing employee compensation and benefits.

Sound Credit Union Improves Member Service With Self-Service Analytics

Sound Credit Union was facing a challenge of lack of visibility into member data. This made it difficult for the employees to answer member questions and take action on their behalf. They could not easily combine data from diverse sources to achieve a cohesive, 360-degree view of member activities. The organization was bogged down with too much manual work and too many assumptions based on incomplete data. For instance, they knew they needed more deposits, but they couldn’t decipher the trend in their checking accounts, savings, money market accounts, CDs, and other deposit vehicles. They needed an executive dashboard and solid analytics to give them answers.

Goodfellow Shores Up Business With Enhanced Reporting

Goodfellow Inc., a wholesaler and distributor of wood and wood byproducts, was hit hard by the economic downturn. The company was seeing a dwindling number of construction projects and clients going out of business. Goodfellow knew it needed better insight into key operations to maintain its position as an industry leader and its reputation for expertise in lumber processing and customer satisfaction. The company wanted a solution that could maximize efficiency and facilitate just-in-time business models – a strategy made even more critical by diminishing cash flow. Until recently, the IT group at Goodfellow struggled with an issue very common in large enterprises: All requests for information were routed to the IT department. Fulfilling these requests was very time-consuming for IT Director Graham Rattray and his group, so they needed to implement some major changes in the way information flowed throughout the company.

ICA Fluor Empowers Business Users With Better Analytics

ICA Fluor, a leading industrial engineering construction company in Mexico, was facing the challenge of consolidating information from multiple sources into one repository and making the data available to approximately 70 senior managers. As the company grew in size, the volume of data generated also increased exponentially. The company's executives were looking for a new business analytics system with powerful capabilities for frontend business intelligence (BI) and back-end data management. They wanted to develop a user-friendly analytics environment that streamlines access to current project information and extends self-service reporting functionality to HR, procurement, and other departments.

Informa Advances Information Services With iWay Data Quality Server

Informa plc, a multinational publishing, conference, and information management company, was facing a challenge with its massive amount of data. The company generates a large amount of data through its various divisions, including Global Events, Academic Publishing, and Business Intelligence. The database serves a global audience and contains 13 million corporate addresses and about 35 million personal records. However, every country has its own way of listing addresses, zip codes, locations, street numbers, and other identifying information. This led to a problem of data inconsistency and duplication. The quality of the information could vary by source, and over time information ages and loses its relevance. Problems arise if the data is not periodically updated or removed.

ICO’s Ship Comes in With Business Intelligence

International Car Operators (ICO) is a leading company in the material-handling industry, specializing in loading and unloading cargo ships. They offer a broad range of logistics services related to terminals, vessels, shipping agencies, vehicle support, and customs clearance. The company faced a challenge in offering a system that would facilitate the efficient processing and sharing of information between entering ships, material-handling and logistic service providers, and customers. They needed a system that could collate all available information and present it to customers in the most convenient and accessible way possible. The information should also be available to support key business processes.

iWay Enhances B2B Collaboration for Maitland

Maitland, a global provider of fund administration, legal, tax, fiduciary, and investment advisory services, was seeking a general-purpose software environment that could simplify data integration, data quality, application integration, and B2B integration for SWIFT message processing. The company wanted to link its trading and settlement systems and orchestrate new interfaces to internal and external systems. The challenge was to find a platform that could read, write, and enrich SWIFT transactions while shielding clients from the complexities of the underlying computing environment. The company also wanted to enable straight-through processing (STP) by setting up SWIFT-based messaging for Maitland’s external trading partners.

Pershing Gains Financial Insight

Pershing LLC, a leading provider of clearing and financial services outsourcing solutions, was facing a challenge. They needed to find a way to deliver targeted analytical information to tens of thousands of busy brokers without requiring them to learn a report writer or deal with cryptic database technology. The company serves more than 1,100 financial organizations and independent investment advisors, who collectively represent nearly six million individual investors. Pershing has more than $800 billion on under administration. Previously these investment professionals could only access customer information via hard copy reports or standard files containing all their data, which they had to manage and use on their own. NetExchange Pro had some rudimentary reporting capabilities, but they were geared toward accessing information one account at a time or one investment professional at a time. As a result, many of these external users were requesting custom reports from Pershing’s IT department, which was putting a drain on programming resources.

Scotiabank Invests in iWay Software Integration Technology

Scotiabank, a premier financial institution in North America, was facing challenges with its outdated sales information infrastructure. The existing system was causing delays in the delivery and validation of key information needed to support critical growth strategies. The bank's retail banking executives needed to automate a complex sales reporting process for their branch operations. The manual sales reporting process was dependent on officer input, leading to inconsistencies in reported results across the bank's 1,024 branches. The interpretation of complex business rules in the manual system resulted in inconsistency of reported results. The bank wanted to replace this manual system with an automated one that captures sales opportunities and then reports the data back to sales officers in the form of coaching and sales results reports.

University of Fraser Valley Fosters Institutional Intelligence and Improves Decision-Making

The University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) was facing challenges in gathering information from disparate relational databases and their Banner ERP system. They were using Microsoft Access queries to collect data, which was then loaded into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for analysis. This process was time-consuming and did not scale well. Each new project or field of inquiry required a new set of queries and spreadsheets. The university wanted to improve the distribution and availability of data within the institution. They were looking for a solution that could consolidate their data for clean, aggregated reporting and provide metrics about enrollment, academics, programs registration, and other domains.

Broad-Reaching EAI Infrastructure Supports Rapid Growth at Winston Brands

Winston Brands, a fast-growing direct-to-consumer multi-channel merchandising firm, was facing challenges in integrating a wide array of systems, both internal and external, to support the increasing number of transactions resulting from the company's continued growth. The company's technology solutions struggled to keep pace with such rapid expansion, and they were replaced with several new, more robust information systems. However, connecting those systems, many of which were deployed simultaneously, proved to be a challenge. The organization evaluated all the other primary integration vendors on the market, including, TIBCO, and IBM.

Analytics Portal Streamlines Contract Labor Programs

Allegis Global Solutions (AGS) had more than 100 variations of an Excel-based reporting solution, making it difficult to create, manage, and benchmark contract labor programs. While these reporting tools do let users see program performance, business leaders had difficulty using them to include comparative analytics and performance benchmarking. Because different customers have different requirements, AGS amassed more than 100 different variations of the same basic spreadsheets and reports. It was cumbersome to create, manage, and keep track of so many variants. AGS set out to create a more versatile analytics environment using a popular new data visualization tool. Unfortunately, after making some headway with the front-end components, AGS realized that the tool did not have adequate capabilities for enterprise deployment.

Halifax Health Spreads Business Intelligence Throughout the Enterprise

Halifax Health, the largest healthcare provider in Volusia and Flagler counties, was facing challenges with its legacy reporting tools which were designed for professional analysts. The organization needed a general-purpose BI environment that could empower the enterprise to access, analyze, and share information. The existing tools, McKesson’s Trendstar and Meditech NPR report writer, required staffing by highly-experienced IT personnel for in-house development. The organization wanted to leverage clinical and administrative data in Meditech, TeletTracking, eSignature, Kronos, and Allscripts applications. They also wanted end-user dashboards that could display key performance indicators (KPIs) for inpatient quality, patient safety, core measures, and financial measures. Ideally, the solution would also support drill-down capabilities, mobile computing, offline analysis, self-service reporting, report scheduling, and intelligent report distribution.

Arcadia Group, the UK's largest clothing retailer, recognized the need for a robust business intelligence platform to improve decision-making and business performance. The retail industry has become fiercely competitive, and consumer loyalty is no longer guaranteed. To gain a competitive edge, Arcadia sought to access and analyze accurate, consistent, and timely information. In the late 1990s, Arcadia embarked on a major data warehouse project with IBM to centralize information for its international, group finance, and branch merchandising teams. By 2005, Arcadia had created a robust, well-structured data warehouse for its central operations, supplemented by a business intelligence (BI) tool providing reports to around 200 users. However, Arcadia recognized the need to extend the solution across the enterprise to include the buyers and merchandisers of its eight trading brands. These teams were using legacy applications, which had become inflexible and restrictive in Arcadia’s international strategy, such as lacking multi-channel access or multi-currency functionality.

WebFOCUS Optimizes Project Management at Belcan

Belcan Corporation, a provider of engineering, staffing, and other innovative outsourcing solutions to the manufacturing industry, was facing a challenge in improving access to critical business information contained in JD Edwards systems running on an IBM i platform. The company had received a request to provide access to information residing in its JD Edwards World systems. Although the requests were met, the implementation did not provide the flexibility end users needed, nor did it support all platforms required in today’s changing technology environments. The company needed a solution that could streamline real-time data access across multiple platforms.

BGL Group uses Information Builders to enhance customer relationships

BGL Group, a UK-based financial services group, was seeking to improve its communication with customers and partners by providing better insights more frequently. The company undertook a strategic review of its existing Management Information strategies and systems, as well as the future demands these would experience. The review identified key goals around improving the delivery of information to partners, customers and users throughout the business, as well as improving the efficiency of the development requirements that would support this. The group-wide platform had to meet the very different demands for each user group. With executives pulling ad hoc reports in meetings, super users manipulating data to discover new insights and partners drilling down into their own information, customised apps and ultimately secure access to the right data for each user was vital.

Butler Health Verifies Meaningful Use With WebFOCUS

Butler Health System (BHS) was required to demonstrate to the federal government that it was using electronic health record (EHR) technology to earn incentive payments from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), as defined by the HITECH Act of 2009. There were a number of criteria that verified this “meaningful use” eligibility, including submitting Clinical Quality Metrics to CMS. BHS was also required to guide its pay-for-performance initiatives. Previously, its analysts created reports directly from operational reporting systems such as MEDITECH. They also used Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Reporting Services, Microsoft Analysis Services, and general-purpose BI tools from MicroStrategy. However, none of these tools provided what was needed to meet the Federal requirements for meaningful use or the detailed analysis required for the hospital’s pay-for-performance objectives.

CEMEX Solidifies Analytics Strategy With WebFOCUS Dashboards and InfoApps TM

As CEMEX increased in size, IT leaders realized that the volume and variety of operational data they had to process would soon overwhelm their IT environment. For example, when it came to reporting, it was difficult to achieve a consolidated view of financial and operational activities, which severely impacted decision-making throughout the company. The corporate comptroller, responsible for providing critical financial and operational information to the vice president of finance, was especially challenged to manage the influx of information.

Central Washington University Gets SMART With WebFOCUS

Central Washington University (CWU) was heavily reliant on an Oracle PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for most of its reporting activities. However, the process was slow, laborious, and paper-intensive. Some queries took 20 minutes or longer to execute, which impacted the performance of the ERP system and sometimes caused it to crash. Keeping up with state and federal compliance requirements was particularly difficult. For example, one report for the Public Centralized Higher Education Enrollment System (PCHEES) included hundreds of pages and took eight months to produce. The university also had to create large reports for U.S. News & World Report, ACT, and Petersons. This meant the reporting team had to respond to dozens of public requests from state agencies and create more than 100 internal reports each year.

CBIZ Navigates Diverse Application Landscape With iWay BPA Suite

CBIZ, a professional services company in the U.S., provides a comprehensive range of outsourced business services, products, and solutions to help organizations manage their finances, employees, and technology. Over the years, the company followed an enterprise software strategy that included purchasing best-of-breed software applications for human resources (HR), customer relationship management (CRM), time and billing, scheduling, and other key operations. These applications rely on relational databases, such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, to store and share information. However, the organization’s small IT team struggled to integrate those systems cohesively. CBIZ had difficulty creating a uniform, high-quality data store that ensured accuracy and minimized manual data entry and auditing procedures.

City of Irving Drives $25 Million in Revenue With Performance Analytics

The City of Irving, Texas, which supports 24 service departments, was looking to create a culture of transparency and accountability. The existing performance measurements were activity-based and not tied to departmental goals and funding allocations. As a result, measurement selections and outcomes were not adequately discussed. The city wanted to improve its ability to monitor performance and trends across all city departments and provide transparency into its administrative processes.

City of Richardson Goes Mobile With WebFOCUS

The City of Richardson, a suburb of Dallas with over 100,000 residents and 5,000 businesses, was looking to extend its successful BI strategy by making vital data instantly accessible to different types of city workers in the field via their mobile devices. The city had previously employed Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to support activities such as accounting and budgeting, revenue management, human resources, and court docket management. The challenge was to expand its reporting and analysis capabilities to reach those employees in the field via their mobile devices.

CONAGUA Drinks Up Success With Business Intelligence

CONAGUA, Mexico’s National Water Commission, was tasked with overseeing water amounts, quality, use, and conservation. The commission needed a business intelligence (BI) platform that could transform raw data about water resources into useful information to help public decision-makers do their jobs. Initially, all information was compiled in hardcopy format, and only later transferred into digital format. The commission had statistical and geographical databases in place, but they were updated manually. Over the years the range and depth of subjects, as well as the sheer volume of information, grew exponentially, making data management and verification more of a challenge.

Covidien UK: Delivering Cost-Effective Operational BI Solution

Covidien UK, a leading provider of innovative healthcare products, faced the challenge of delivering daily operational business intelligence to its 300 field-based sales staff in a cost-effective manner. The company needed a solution that would allow its sales staff to interrogate data without the need for extensive training and support. The challenge was compounded by the fact that Covidien UK has over 2,000 customers and an annual turnover approaching £150 million, making the volume of data to be managed and analyzed substantial. Furthermore, the company's growth through acquisitions over the past ten years meant that new data sources needed to be integrated quickly and easily into core business reports.

Cloud-Based BI Environment Revs Up Dealertrack’s Dealer Management System

Dealertrack, the largest online credit application network in the U.S., lacked modern reporting, analytics, and data visualization capabilities in its flagship Dealer Management System (DMS). The software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution included numerous built-in reports, but customers lacked parameterized reporting options and were not able to create reports from scratch. They only had rudimentary tools for visualizing business data in charts, graphs, and dashboards. These deficiencies led Dealertrack to purchase Information Builders’ industry-leading WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics software. Dealertrack evaluated nearly a dozen BI products before selecting WebFOCUS. After a careful analysis, it determined that the WebFOCUS architecture is ideal for SaaS and cloud deployments since it is based on a highly scalable reporting server that is accessible from any web browser, with no special software required at the dealerships.

DuPont, a global innovator with a complex IT infrastructure, sought to renew its corporate extranet, DuPont Direct, to make it easier for B2B users to do business with them. The challenge was to improve the infrastructure for an e-commerce application that enables web users to create and place orders, check order status, make queries, and check accounts in real time, all via a secure, high-performance environment. However, integrating these complex ERP systems with e-commerce applications often leads to labor-intensive coding projects and ongoing manual updates. DuPont IT infrastructure experts reviewed various types of integration software to connect its Sun Microsystems application server environment to its SAP R/3 applications.

Erie Insurance Boosts Performance With WebFOCUS

Erie Insurance, a multi-line insurance provider, was looking to execute on the new CEO’s vision to make more strategic use of data to improve organizational performance. The CEO, Terrence W. Cavanaugh, wanted to enable users to better leverage the wealth of data the company maintained. His goal was to deploy a series of internal and external dashboards that would support decision-making and deliver information across all levels of the business. The challenge was to create a web-based reporting environment that would allow thousands of authorized employees to monitor approximately 75 key performance indicators (KPIs) across critical domains such as customers, finance, service productivity, human resources, and distribution.

Farm Bureau Insurance Improves Profitability With Better Business Intelligence

Farm Bureau Insurance, a leading insurer in Tennessee, was faced with a significant challenge in 2011 when two devastating storms resulted in a year's worth of claims in just two months. The company's existing reporting processes were cumbersome and could not provide the real-time data, drill-down functionality, and ad hoc capabilities that managers required to effectively handle the situation. The company needed better access to data and improved reporting capabilities for a clearer view into its operational performance and financial metrics. The turmoil from these unexpected events became the driving force for Farm Bureau Insurance to gain a clearer view into its operational performance and financial metrics.

Siemens Improves Forecasting With WebFOCUS

Siemens Energy, a division of Siemens AG, is a leading supplier of products, services, and solutions for power generation plants. The company's Replacement Parts and Fleet Services division faced a significant challenge in accurately forecasting the availability of essential replacement parts. These parts have complex delivery schedules, long lead times, and are of tremendous value to power plant operations. The sales reps had difficulty forecasting the availability of these parts, which could lead to a standstill of an entire plant and cause significant financial loss. The division used an SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to manage orders and requisitions. However, the sales reps needed a more efficient way to examine sales orders and monitor the supply chain to ensure timely delivery of parts.

Utz Nourishes Workers With Clean Data and Actionable Insights

Utz Quality Foods, a large privately held snack food company, was facing the challenge of creating an enterprise-wide analytics strategy to support its rapid growth through both organic growth and mergers and acquisitions. The company needed to deploy real-time analytics to speed up decision-making and empower business units to take control of their data. They also needed to unlock clean, high-quality information via self-service dashboards, InfoApps, and other analytics assets. The company was looking for a way to increase efficiency and better compete with larger snack food companies.

Customer-Facing BI Helps AACA Manage $2.6 Billion Portfolio

The American Alliance of Creditor Attorneys (AACA) was facing a challenge in promptly identifying and addressing problems with law firms or debt portfolios. It would sometimes take as long as six months to uncover an account languishing in a non-suit status or waiting on documents. These delays hindered the ability of the firm’s attorneys to make adjustments to their collection efforts. As a result, they were unable to negotiate payments or move accounts to judgment as quickly as possible. The inability for clients and law firms to access current account information on post charged-off consumer debt was delaying critical collection activities.

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