FiberMark, a multinational company specializing in the production of specialty fiber-based materials, was struggling with data management. As the company grew, the volume of data it collected began to exceed its ability to effectively analyze and gain insights from it. The company's JD Edwards system was managing ERP-related data effectively, but the management had to run thousands of pages of reports to extract any information from that data. This process was time-consuming and often did not provide the necessary information for making quick, accurate, and well-informed decisions. The company needed a solution that would allow them to interact with their data in ways that were not previously possible.

Finanmadrid, the financial division of the Cajamadrid Group, was facing challenges with its reporting system. The company's needs for a global, efficient, and optimal reporting system led its Systems Department to seek out an application that would improve both horizontal and vertical reporting. Given the complexity of its operating systems, which were divided up among various technological applications, the main requirement was to find one system that would link together data from all departments. Data were extracted on a monthly basis from the accounting department, the various business divisions, and the general administrative division, thus leading to a need for management reports that were more agile and could be produced more frequently. Greater flexibility was also sought when it came to implementing tactical decisions, the effectiveness of which had to be tested without the complexity of modifying accounting structures.

Finter Bank Zürich, an independent Swiss private bank, was facing performance limitations with its legacy reporting solution. The bank was using a management information system (MIS) based on manual Excel spreadsheet software analyses, which was becoming increasingly complex and error-prone. The time spent producing necessary reports was constantly growing, leading to delays. The old MIS was completely geared to the old system and was no longer capable of meeting new challenges. The bank needed an efficient, up-to-date solution designed around the new infrastructure.

Fleura Export B.V., a Dutch importer and exporter of cut flowers and cut foliage, was facing challenges due to its complex organizational structure. The company, which is managed centrally, has buying subsidies and sales offices in various countries, a range of operations, and different IT systems. This complexity was increasingly impacting the company’s course of business. The company's information provision had turned into chaos with scores of Excel reports and emails complicating the management of the company. In early 2006, Fleura started looking for a Business Intelligence (BI) solution with a consolidation tool for its financial reports and a reporting tool for its buying subsidies to replace the obsolete Oracle solution it was using. The company wanted a cutting-edge product which would be easy to use, fast to implement and self-explanatory, therefore requiring no extensive training given the complex structure of its organization.

Fondaco SGR, a leading independent money management company, was facing several challenges related to the analysis of financial data on managed funds and funds under management. The company was looking for a solution to optimize this process and automate the creation of reports for top management. The goal was to improve the overall quality of the analyses and reports produced. The company needed a solution that could provide comprehensive insights into key financial metrics across funds, performance, deviations, and risk.

France Domaine, a department of the Directorate General of Public Finances in France, manages the government property policy. It represents the interests of the government as a property owner managing assets in its stock of buildings valued at a little over €100 billion. The French Government has in the past few years undertaken a review of its property policy and made a complete study of its stock of buildings and property assets. This efficiency drive is based partly on modernising practices controlling the sale of Government buildings. It also involves ensuring more effective management of buildings and their occupancy. This in turn entails implementation of notional rents internal to Government, leases between France Domaine and ministry departments or other public sector operators, and commitments to real estate performance objectives. Co-ordinated by France Domaine and locally by Prefects who represent the state in the regions, strategic plans make it possible to establish the property requirements of the public sector for the ensuing financial years. It also aims to implement a consistent and rational nationwide property policy.

Furninova, a leading manufacturer of household indoor furniture, was facing challenges with its existing manufacturing planning system (MPS). The system, which was used to manage all aspects of production, had limited capabilities to provide sales or statistical reporting. This was causing delays in generating reports across multiple functional areas of the business and affecting the accuracy and timeliness of analysis, which in turn was impacting business decisions. The company needed a tool that could capture information from various systems and provide quick views, analysis and on-the-fly reports. Management needed this capability to anticipate customer trends and make better and more informed decisions.

Gatorade de Mexico, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, Inc., was facing challenges in accessing real-time sales data to proactively respond to market changes. The company was using MicroStrategy for Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting, but the tool’s complexity made it difficult for the sales support team to easily access and analyze the real-time data they needed. Producing reports could take anywhere from 40 minutes for basic sales performance reports to four hours for more strategic sales analysis. The business users needed to engage a sales support analyst to run multiple MicroStrategy reports, export them to Excel, and then map, update and consolidate the data to get the answers they needed. Since MicroStrategy only refreshed on a daily basis, the information was outdated and the high level of manual manipulation increased the margin of error.

Genzyme Therapeutics, a pioneer in the development and delivery of transformative therapies for patients affected by rare and debilitating diseases, was facing challenges in accessing and extracting data from multiple sources. The company lacked a comprehensive view of productivity, efficiencies, and revenue, and had inaccurate performance reporting for its business units. Genzyme services customers in both the clinical and the commercial operations areas of the business. In both areas, timely, accurate data helps inform decision-making that leads to increased revenue and better information for patients. In 2009, the company was looking for a reporting solution that would bring data together from across platforms and make it available in a dashboard that would allow users to easily gain insight and make decisions.

The Global Retail Bank was facing a challenge of high cost per question due to the chaotic use of spreadsheets and unmanageable processes. The bank had spent hundreds of millions on legacy reporting, analysis, and modeling, which created too many barriers for decision-maker access to key information. The chairman of the bank had publicly stated that the bank would excel through innovation, and thus, there was a need for a solution that could lower the cost per question and manage the processes more efficiently.

Go Ape, a rapidly growing outdoor adventure company, was struggling to manage and identify with their business as they expanded. They had too many different data sources, too many spreadsheets, and too much information in too many places. Everything was fragmented, and every report pack took too long to pull together. The company needed a simple yet effective reporting solution to allow them to reconnect with their business and allow them to manage in real-time. They also faced challenges in managing their recruitment process, which involved hiring up to 500 people in the space of 3 weeks each year. They needed a solution that would allow their managers to access, retrieve and process applications, as well as conduct interviews.

Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL), a major player in the Indian FMCG market, was facing challenges with its reporting process. The company was dealing with duplication in reporting and delayed response times across departments. This was affecting the decision-making process as the reports were not available in real-time. GCPL was using SAP ERP as its foundation which was supported by the SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse solution for Business Intelligence, analytics, and reporting. However, the company was looking for a self-service, user-friendly BI solution that could provide improved analytical capabilities at all levels across the organization by allowing users to segment data across geographies, products, and sales hierarchies.

Good Health, a manufacturer and distributor of natural health products, was facing several challenges. The company was receiving multiple report requests from internal employees and external partner companies. There was a high volume of ad hoc communications among company employees, and there was no efficient way to track the manufacturing and distribution of products. Furthermore, the company had little insight into which product lines weren’t selling. The company's ERP system, while housing the necessary data for business operations, was increasingly difficult and time-consuming for reporting. The rise in requests for different reports from staff members was becoming burdensome as each report had to be manually prepared.

Groupe Pasteur Mutualité was facing challenges due to the existence of several databases and multiple demands on the IT department. The lack of internal organization and unstructured information linked to multiple disparate databases greatly increased the load on the IT department, which was stressed by the multiple requests. Requests for statistics, specific studies or technical management reports clogged up the IT department. Each query had its request and response: nothing was unified. Since the frequency of requests submitted to the IT department by the business staff had become a daily occurrence, it had become urgent to implement a solution enabling quick access to all of the databases.

Grotto S.p.A., a manufacturer and distributor of Gas clothing worldwide, was facing challenges in analyzing market results, managing and fulfilling extemporary requests for information, and monitoring the turnover of in-store stock at each retail location. The company's evolution in the retail world created the need for a structured solution so that sales management could analyze direct and associated stores on a daily basis. The data covered multiple business functions – from checking overall shop sales to analyzing top selling styles and fabrics in the various markets, and stock turnover – and required drill down to individual details. Moreover, the solution had to handle ad-hoc reporting without additional expenses and development costs for the IT department, and be easy enough for any end user.

Groupe Rossel, a multimedia publishing house, was facing challenges in providing uniform reporting and analysis capabilities for the diversified business lines and companies within the group. The group's operational management teams required data to optimize their business lines, including distribution, sales, subscriptions, and marketing. However, the company did not have a strategy in place to support these data and reporting requests. For instance, figures on sales and subscriptions required two full-time IT employees spending three days a week to generate the report, while two full-time business line employees spent five days a week gathering the required data.

Grupo Munreco, a leader in the Spanish watch manufacturing sector, needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that would provide the group with fast access to all company information, as well as a tool to help managers carry out analyses from different perspectives. They wanted a solution that was flexible, fast, user-friendly, and provided self-service BI. The company wanted to optimize its order fulfillment service, monitor each and every one of the orders and repairs processes, and integrate them within an automated warehouse system.

Halton Group, an international company specializing in indoor climate products, was facing challenges in managing its worldwide growth. The company's existing enterprise software systems were unable to deliver the types of reports and analysis needed to proactively manage day-to-day business operations. The business warehouse module connected to one of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems was complex to operate and provided a limited number of reports. Halton needed a solution that promoted self-sufficiency and did not require programming or any extensive set-up to create and run reports. The company also needed a product that could integrate with its multiple enterprise software applications to centralize and standardize its reporting processes and improve supply chain efficiency and customer service.

In 2008, Haws Corporation was facing significant business concerns that led to the need for a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The company moved to a Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system in 2009, but found that the system did not deliver the Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities it needed. With data visibility challenges into sales orders, profit margins and inventory costs, and backlogs not being measured efficiently, Haws needed a better BI solution. Further, sales and finance departments solely depended on individuals like Jim Martin, Database Administrator, to build the reports they needed within their departments. As a result, Martin spent the majority of his time creating reports, which required significant time and resource investment. To keep up with competitors and the commoditization of the drinking fountain industry, Haws needed to continue its overall company growth by maintaining a high quality water product and simultaneously meeting the market demand for pricing. In order to achieve this goal, Haws recognized that it was critical for the company to analyze and interact with its data more efficiently and comprehensively.

Haymarket Media Group, the largest privately-owned publishing company in the UK, was facing a growing volume of business data which left the company data rich but information poor. The company was sending more than 13 million emails every month to bulletin subscribers and for marketing activity. However, without visibility of the data, it was impossible to derive any business intelligence from it. Initially, Haymarket tried to solve this with BusinessObjects’ Crystal Reports and Excelsius software but after six months of work creating dashboards and static reports from management accounts a prototype still wasn’t ready. Then in May 2009 QlikView offered Haymarket a ‘Seeing is Believing’ demonstration. The QlikView software was installed on a server, data loaded, and a dashboard built using 10 million records from their own financial data within three hours. What had previously taken them months was done in hours in QlikView.

The Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (HBO-raad) is the interests and employers’ association for the Dutch universities in this sector funded by the government. The association acts to strengthen the position of these institutes, maintaining a wide network to this end. Among the most important duties of the association is acting as spokesman and maintaining the lobby for the government, as well as initiating and carrying out projects involving quality and supporting its members. As an employers’ association the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences also represents all 40,000 employees in the sector. Part of the HBO-raad’s service brief is to collect and provide benchmarking information. This information is public and is used principally by its members, the education ministry and the press. This is information from internal and external sources concerning intake, enrolment, results, study duration, staffing and progress. Prior to the introduction of QlikView, this information was placed on the HBO-raad website in brief static summaries.

Heembouw, a one-stop provider of building services, was facing challenges in enhancing visual management in support of the Lean management philosophy. The company was struggling with minimizing error margins during the data entry process for management dashboards and automating the input process for existing dashboards. The publication of the dashboards was too time-consuming for the employees as they had to retrieve data from source systems and enter them manually into Excel sheets. With 30 to 40 project dashboards a month, automating this process seemed a viable option. Moreover, visual management was starting to play an increasingly important role in the organization, so many dashboards had already been developed in Excel.

HEROtsc, a leading Business Process Outsourcing company in the UK, was facing challenges in managing large volumes of data spread over 10 different UK offices. The company needed to radically overhaul the way its data was used to add value to both their clients and their own business. They were looking for an efficient and cost-effective way of uniting, presenting, and communicating complex business data throughout the enterprise without the wide range of challenges associated with manual collation using Excel spreadsheets.

Holmes Murphy & Associates, a premier independent risk management and insurance brokerage firm, was facing the challenge of managing the complexity of its ever-increasing variety of data sources. The company processes large volumes of diverse data from a wide variety of sources in complex formats. The data consists of everything from fixed format text, to spreadsheets, to web data, and no matter what format it comes in, they have to work with it. The company needed to implement a solution to manage the complexity of its ever increasing variety of data sources. Further, Holmes Murphy needed a means to codify its business rules and ensure consistency in the data by reducing human error.

Intercontainer Austria (ICA) is a leading transportation company in Austria, providing shipping and transportation services by rail and road, as well as via inland and coastal shipping. The company is headquartered in Vienna, managing other branches in Salzburg, Villach, Wels, and Germany. However, efficient control of these territories was only possible with transparent processes and comprehensive reporting for individual customers and branches. Previously, this requirement was addressed using Excel, with different PivotTables and cross-references. Given the increasing complexity, this was a very cumbersome and error-prone procedure. A new solution was needed that could produce more efficient, more detailed analyses and reports to optimize capacity management and contribute to improvements in business processes through faster, more flexible evaluations.

ILCo, the Integrated Logistics Company, operates the Dalrymple Bay Coal Chain, a major coal supply chain made up of 14 stakeholders, including mining companies, rail and terminal operators, rail network manager and government agencies in the northern Bowen Basin part of central Queensland, Australia. The industry is responsible for millions of tonnes through coal exports and the smallest process improvements can lead to millions of dollars in savings. However, during ILCo’s first two years of operation it became apparent that there was a lack of transparency and understanding in how the 14 participants, who all rely on each other, work together. Each of the companies was collecting its own data and measuring what they believed was important. However, this didn’t take into account was important to the other participants. For example, rail operators were reporting on train cancellations whereas punctuality was important to their supply chain partners. In order for the coal chain to work as efficiently as possible a new, holistic approach was needed – one where the information collected and shared could be used for mutual benefit and profit.

Illes Seasonings & Flavors, a leading manufacturer of liquid and dry food ingredients, was facing challenges in providing timely and accurate data to its customers. The sales representatives lacked real-time visibility into customers’ supply chains, which was crucial for them to view order transactions and have the ability to drill down into shipment information, lot number, manufacturing job and other granular details about each customer. Without the tools to do this, the sales force was spending an excessive amount of time communicating to customer service representatives about the status of orders, and as a result customer satisfaction was suffering. Additionally, sales representatives needed a better mobile device to bring to their on-site meetings with customers. Laptops proved to take an excessive amount of time to set up, further exacerbating customer service issues. Sales people needed to have real-time BI at their disposal, whether they were sitting at their desks or visiting a client.

iSi North America, a multi-national provider of specialty pressure cylinders for industrial and consumer applications, was facing several challenges. The company was data-rich but information-poor. Sales analysis was a tedious, time-consuming process, and the company was losing money on unprofitable customers and products. The company lacked a clear view of the profitability of specific customers or products, and the burden of report generation was heavy on the small, stressed IT staff. The company made a significant investment in Lawson’s M3 or Movex ERP system, but still found itself struggling with data analysis.

Istobal, a leader in the car, automobile, lorry and bus washing tools sector, was facing a need for Business Intelligence (BI) tools for fast, agile, and easy tracking and better controls. The company was in the midst of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) migration project, which made the need for a BI tool even more necessary. The company needed a tool that could integrate with databases from different systems and some Excel flat files, and that was easy to use and develop. The company was also looking for a tool that could provide better and more efficient information analysis to drive decision-making.

Jaga, a Belgian multinational that develops and sells innovative heating concepts, was facing challenges in providing timely insight into SAP sales data and performing trend analyses of forecasts, sales results, product and product group performance, countries, regions, and resellers. The company was using Excel spreadsheets for these reports and analyses, which resulted in a lot of manual work to consolidate the required data into a single spreadsheet. In addition, people often used outdated and incomplete data, which sometimes resulted in the wrong decisions being taken. Creating the necessary graphs and statistics in order to perform proper analysis was a very time-consuming activity. In these conditions, when flexibility and speed are key words in every healthy business, a solid BI solution was indispensable.