Hauni Maschinenbau, a mechanical engineering company for the international tobacco industry, faced the challenge of integrating several companies with disparate databases into a single tool. The company needed a solution that could trace procurement activity outside of the standard procurement channels, such as 'purchasing mavericks' and unauthorized decentralized purchasing by departments. The lack of a unified system made it difficult to track and manage procurement activities effectively, leading to inefficiencies and potential losses.

Hypotheken Data Netwerk (HDN) Beheer B.A., the Dutch Mortgage Data Network, was facing several challenges. They needed to provide mortgage providers and mortgage brokers with secure reporting and analysis capabilities for benchmarking. They also aimed to increase the added value offered by the HDN electronic messaging platform to increase market share. Furthermore, they wanted to provide insight into up-to-date and valid information about the status of the Dutch mortgage market. Traditionally, mortgage providers and intermediaries had no insight at all into market data. The only available data had come from the Dutch land registry, Kadaster, which records property sales. As the land registry only has a record when properties are actually sold, the data that is available is neither up-to-date or complete.

Karolinska University Hospital was facing several challenges related to data access and analysis. The hospital was unable to access and analyze data in its ICU Klinisoft system with reports and ad-hoc analysis requests. This inability extended to assessing the type of patients, resources, and outcomes. The hospital's prior SIR reporting was time-consuming, involving several resources and spreadsheets. The static reports provided no help for the doctors in answering the real-life questions needed in the OR/ICU.

KG Knutsson, a large family-owned company in Sweden, was facing challenges with its business performance due to lack of clear understanding of information in its Movex system. The lack of visibility was driving up inventory costs and undermining accounts receivable management. The company was spending too much time and energy to create reports. They needed a better control and an overview of the information in its Movex ERP system. They evaluated a number of different tools and chose QlikView.

KLM Equipment Services, a subsidiary of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, manages a large fleet of motorized and non-motorized vehicles and hoisting equipment. The company aims to save costs for its customers, which include KLM, Menzies, Martinair, and Transavia. The fleet managers at KLM Equipment Services are responsible for the purchase and maintenance of ground support equipment for their customers. Being able to quickly deliver adequate dynamic reports of, for example, repairs, malfunctions, usage statistics, and depreciation, is crucial. However, before the implementation of a Business Intelligence solution, they provided these reports using Excel, which proved to be too limited. There were several issues: from control issues and the complexity of retrieving data from their AS/400 database, to the fact that the reports were extremely labor-intensive, difficult to reproduce and highly error prone.

Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Trust, one of the largest specialist heart and chest hospitals in the UK, was looking to improve its Patient Level Costing system and introduce a flexible, easy-to-use Service Line Reporting system. The Trust wanted a system that would enable information to be shared across the whole organisation. They needed a system that could pull together millions of records of data from disparate sources and display it in an easy-to-understand visual dashboard. The system also needed to be easy to navigate and use, a key factor for busy hospital staff.

Marienhospital Gelsenkirchen, a leading academic training hospital in Germany, was facing challenges in amplifying transparency within the clinic to achieve greater efficiency and prepare for the statutory demands of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG). The hospital was struggling with the efficient evaluation of patient data from diverse information systems. The introduction of the DRG-System for service related accounting in 2003 made it clear to the hospital that they needed to create more transparency within the clinic to achieve greater efficiency in the administration of internal services and to be prepared for the DRGs during annual budget negotiations with the Health Insurance Funds. The limitations of the existing system were reached extremely quickly. The standard evaluation software (Excel) was not capable of effectively analyzing the extensive amounts of data created from 27,000 patients per year.

MassMutual Asia was facing challenges with their previous Business Intelligence Systems (BIS). The systems were inflexible, had poor performance, and were unable to meet users’ requirements or provide on-time reports. This was affecting the efficiency of decision making and the competitiveness of their products and services. The company had tried to switch to another traditional BIS, but this also presented problems. The development tools lacked flexibility, many user requirements could not be fulfilled, and developers had to do extra programming and settings because of its architecture. The system also utilized tremendous resources and required many servers to run effectively, making maintenance costs high and increasing overall IT expenditure.

McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, was facing challenges around its financial reporting and operational processes. The company found that its Business Intelligence (BI) solutions were limited and employees were unable to aggregate reports in an efficient way. In fact, approximately 50 percent of the finance group spent 50 percent of their time gathering reports, which left very little time to analyze the data and make the appropriate business decisions. Only select employees were actually able to access, view and analyze forecast, bookings and renewals data, which prevented upper management from receiving timely and accurate business insights. Additionally, these challenges greatly increased IT dependency. McAfee needed a BI tool that could standardize reporting, reduce the amount of manual work required to aggregate reports, increase data visibility and empower business users from all over the company to pull reports with little to no IT involvement.

Nanyang Technological University (NTU) was facing challenges in tracking data over the “student lifecycle” from the application and admissions phase to post-graduation performance. The existing static data analysis made ad hoc, real-time reporting difficult. The university was required to provide reports to the Board of Trustees and Ministry of Education. The process of pulling all this information together was tedious, time-consuming and involved a lot of manual effort. The IT department struggled with improving the delivery of the information, but developing reports using NTU’s existing application systems was not easy and took a large amount of effort. The administrative staff needed to use Excel spreadsheets on this outdated data extensively to meet their reporting requirements. These issues often hindered users from acquiring sufficient data to perform trend analysis for decision making.

Nationwide Commercial, a division of Nationwide Building Society, faced the increasing challenge of analysing millions of rows of “big data” about its loans portfolio. The division wanted a holistic view of key strategic data and metrics from a number of sources, including its ProMS property risk management system. The aim was to maximise investment returns and portfolio performance, while reducing operational risk and improving ease of compliance. By improving the quality and speed with which it can answer queries or produce on-demand reports, Nationwide Commercial can assess the characteristics and relationships of its commercial loan book more effectively.

CSG Het Noordik, a broad-based combined school in the Netherlands, was looking to introduce a management information platform to support its quality assurance program. The school had a reputation for being good, but it lacked a system to measure and quantify its performance. The school's approach to educational quality and quality assurance was reactive, which is common in the educational sector due to the focus on the primary process of teaching. The school wanted to implement a quality assurance system that was proactive rather than reactive. They wanted to transform data into steering information for fast and effective action. For example, statistical data plays a crucial role during discussions with individual teachers, chain partners, and the education authority.

The North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust serves a diverse and, in places, highly dependent population of approximately 250,000 people. In a challenging time for budgets in the NHS it is vital that resources are used as effectively as possible, whilst continuing to improve the patient experience and the care offered. To help meet that challenge, the Trust initiated an improvement programme. After an initial review, agreement on the need to introduce new measuring tools was reached towards the end of 2009 – with a desire to find a business intelligence tool that made it possible to easily analyse and understand the performance of different parts of the trust.

PerfectServe, a provider of physician contact and patient care communication services, was facing challenges in managing the IT needs of its fast-growing organization. The company was growing at a rate of 50% each year since 2000. They needed a solution that would empower their clients to develop customized data reports without relying on PerfectServe's IT staff. Additionally, they wanted to increase the depth and functionality of their data reports. PerfectServe delivers standard reporting on contact events to its hospital clients typically on a monthly basis. The addition of a “self-serve” business intelligence reporting tool would be a major enhancement for clients as well as a benefit to its own operational productivity.

PRIMAGAS, a utility company with regional headquarters in Krefeld, Dresden, and Würzburg, was facing challenges in analyzing Oracle data for its subsidiary. The data was analyzed by manual reports in Excel, which was a time-consuming process. The company was under high pressure due to its business operations. The parent company was using another tool which was not suitable for PRIMAGAS's business. The company was dealing with large quantities of data.

Radiometer, a pioneer and international market leader for blood gas analyzers, was facing increasing cost pressures and needed to optimize its corporate efficiency. The company was using a complex Excel solution with numerous macros for data evaluation. This procedure was not only error-prone and complex, but it was also difficult to use. In addition, the data volume became too large for such a solution to reliably and quickly handle the evaluations. The company considered adopting an OLAP-based business intelligence solution that was already in use at the parent company in Denmark. However, it quickly became clear that this system also could not satisfy the requirements of Radiometer in Germany.

Ramkrishna Forgings Limited (RKFL), a leading manufacturer and supplier of open and closed die forgings, was facing challenges in improving the performance and efficiency of large-scale data analysis and integrating data from multiple sources effectively. The company had implemented SAP in 2010 to enhance operational philosophy. However, after two years of using the SAP infrastructure, the IT team at RKFL felt that the tools reporting and analytics lacked flexibility and performance to deal with large data volumes from SAP and other non-SAP data sources. Managers used to pull together SAP-reports and analysis using Microsoft Excel, often resulting in inconsistent and incomplete reports. The organization wanted a solution that would be intuitive and simple to use, integrate with the existing SAP applications, deliver deep data analysis capabilities in real-time, and could be accessed anytime using popular mobile devices.

RS Components, as part of the global Electrocomponents PLC group, operates over a large geographical footprint. With the components business being fiercely competitive, the management team considered it mission-critical to be able to make business decisions swiftly. However, their existing decision support system was achieved through the manual consolidation of data directly from their ERP and CRM application systems (JD Edwards and Pivotal). This meant that they were spending too much time on data consolidation before any analysis could be made, delaying important decisions as a result. To tackle this, RS Components realized it needed a management tool or system that could provide strategic insights on the performance of its business across all functions. The system should be able to provide data for their Key Performance Matrixes, and assist management with their strategic discussions thereby improving their decision-making process. In order to achieve this, this system should be able extract data from multiple robust and complex systems spread across a diversed geographical region to provide a common view of the business which everyone in the company could rely on.

SABMiller India had stored all of its data on Microsoft SQL Server and ran its Enterprise and Resource Planning (ERP) system on SYSPRO for its commercial business operations of Finance, Manufacturing and Sales and Distribution. All other business processes were supported by over 45 applications and as a result, the company was unable to generate reports by combining data from multiple applications. SAB Miller India needed reporting and analysis to provide the appropriate level of depth and flexibility in order to comply with statutory requirements, as well as for making crucial business decisions. The company was also dealing with reporting challenges. The team were pulling together multiple data sources into one report, which was a time consuming process, and an inaccurate method for reporting.

Schenker España, a leading Spanish shipping company and a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn (DB) Schenker, was in need of a global information analysis system that could be deployed in the shortest time possible. The company uses diverse technology platforms, each with corporate applications for each specific business area, and an SAP/R3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for financial and logistics management. These platforms include Windows, Citrix, VMWare, Oracle, and various UNIX/Linux-based systems. The company had evaluated various business intelligence (BI) tools and began to develop a pilot project with Business Objects, though this never became a reality. In addition, it had spent most of its available resources in the early stages.

TEAM Computers, a leading IT Infrastructure Solution provider in India, was looking to leverage its vast pool of data to support its ambitious growth plans. The company wanted to proactively manage its day-to-day business operations to maximize revenue. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide a unified view of data pulled from multiple sources, improve performance, and offer better control over productivity.

ThiemeMeulenhoff, one of the three largest educational publishers in the Netherlands, was facing several challenges. The company needed to allow management access to the latest information to gauge performance and allow staff to select and interpret data without the requirement for IT. They also needed to upgrade their reporting to comply with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and transition from a paper-based to a digital information flow. The company was also implementing a timesheet system that still needed a report module. They had the option of choosing between a traditional system, which produced reams of paper lists on a daily, weekly and monthly basis – heavily supported by their IT department – or a more modern Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

Tulikivi Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of heat-retaining fireplaces, adopted a new, product group-based strategy. In line with the new strategy, the company wanted to analyse business information more efficiently. Previously, meetings dragged on while waiting for information, and in many cases the information received was not the information that was agreed on. Further challenges included slow reporting and software, which resulted in waiting for analyses. In the old days, it was a challenge to compile reports manually quickly enough. The software was too slow and they had to wait for analyses. Meetings dragged on and the reports that were produced did not always meet the actual need. Distribution of reports was another problem.

The Réunion Southern Regional Hospital was facing challenges in accessing data from numerous sources and systems. They were using simple single-database query tools which were insufficient to allow users to efficiently access all data. The hospital needed a solution that could integrate data from various different sources and systems, and provide instant access to greater amounts of information in the form of visually rich interactive dashboards, and reports. They also needed a solution that could deliver greater independence and self-sufficiency for users.

Purity Life Health Products LP, a leading distributor of natural health products in Canada, was facing challenges with its legacy system for business data analysis. The system was cumbersome and only a few employees had access to useful and timely data. This lack of data accessibility and transparency was hindering work efficiency and visibility into the business. The company needed a solution that would liberate its data and make it accessible to more people within the organization.

Direct Relief, a global humanitarian aid organization, faced a significant challenge in managing its supply chain. The unpredictable nature of world events and the receipt of products from donors made it difficult to plan and execute logistics efficiently. Furthermore, the organization had to deal with medical products with expiration dates stored in warehouses worldwide. The complexities of shipping times and customs protocols posed a risk of these products being wasted unless Direct Relief could move quickly and maintain full visibility of their supply chain. The data essential for this agility and visibility was trapped in their SAP system, making it inaccessible for effective decision-making.

AFAS Software, a fast-growing ERP software provider, was looking to extend the benefits of enterprise-ready Business Intelligence (BI) to the more than 740,000 users of the AFAS ERP suite. The company wanted to go beyond modernizing business practices and advance to innovation by letting customers see the whole story hidden in their data.

eCare, an IT service provider specializing in 'whole care' healthcare solutions, was looking to enhance its value proposition. The company wanted to deliver easy-to-use visual analytics to business users and provide a software-as-a-service solution that lets users access software from any device. Additionally, eCare aimed to take its solution beyond traditional healthcare technology, providing new ways of visualizing and analyzing daily and historical health data.

Unified Logic, a company specializing in IT asset management, security, and infrastructure solutions, faced the challenge of presenting their vast amount of data in a meaningful and flexible format. Their core product, Movere, integrates more than 1,000 data points and their largest single data set contains more than 50 million rows. The company needed a way to allow their customers to reshape their experience in a meaningful way using this data.

The intensive care units within the Swedish healthcare organization Region Skåne handle patients that need around-the-clock observation and treatment due to very complicated health conditions. All employees are specially educated in intensive care methods and are continuously trained to be able to offer the best possible treatments at all times. The intensive care unit employ approximately 900 people throughout Region Skåne. Intensive care is the most resource intensive area within healthcare and therefore the need for follow up and optimization is particularly great. Region Skåne runs a unique cooperation between its five largest hospitals. For a few years now, the intensive care units have systematically developed common job descriptions for all healthcare tasks. This makes it possible to compare invested resources and results between the hospitals and thereby also draw valuable and meaningful conclusions about how to improve their quality and efficiency.