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, 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, 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 To handle this effectively, Cambridge Memorial needed to replace its outdated manual reporting system with a more efficient and comprehensive solution.

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, 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.

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, 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 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.

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.

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, 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, 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, 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’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.

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.

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, 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 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.