InetSoft Technology

Flight Data Services (FDS), a leading provider of flight data monitoring services, was faced with the challenge of translating raw black box flight data into operational business intelligence. This process is crucial for an aircraft operator’s safety program as it allows for the identification of trends and thorough investigation of minor incidents. These insights enable safety managers to improve operational procedures and training, raise awareness of safety issues within the operation, and assist management in making informed business decisions. FDS needed a solution that would allow them to provide their customers with a secure report portal from which they could instantly and interactively generate their own reports and drill down into data.

Grupo Multimedios, one of Mexico's largest media and entertainment companies, was facing challenges in creating effective executive performance management dashboards. The company had been using spreadsheets, pivot tables, and other BI tools for several years, but the dashboards they created were visually cluttered with lots of numbers. This made it difficult for the end-users to effectively understand and manipulate the data. The company was in need of a new BI tool that would be both easier to use and visually appealing. The goal was to provide a graphical representation of the key data to top management in a way that was easy to understand and manipulate.

Dairy.com provides a vital nationwide service for the dairy industry, transacting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dairy products each year. Major companies such as Dannon; Dean Foods; Dreyer's Ice Cream; Kraft Foods; Land O' Lakes; Leprino Foods; and Schreiber Foods rely on Dairy.com’s supply chain solutions that includes scheduling, spot trading, contracting, and transportation -- as well as comprehensive transaction and trading facilitation services, for a broad variety of dairy commodities. Providing secure, customized access to this highly dynamic data is critical to the operations and profitability of their customers. Prior to implementing InetSoft’s Style Report™ software, Dairy.com used a primarily manual process to report on this wide variety of data. Data access was cumbersome and typically resided on a variety of legacy systems. In many cases, customers received the raw data in static files and had to analyze the information themselves. The process was slow and labor intensive.

T-Formation, a large volume printer in the United States, was facing challenges with its in-house order system solution which provided limited reporting functionality. The system handled all sales, general ledger, artwork management, production schedule, statistics, shipping, receiving, and invoicing, but linking this data in a way to identify opportunities was not easy. The traditional form of reporting did not allow decision makers to get to information easily. The organization knew there were areas they were unable to successfully analyze and wanted to implement a tool that would allow business to see – at a glance – whether they were making a profit and how they could manage their contracts more efficiently.

Over the course of a decade, NCN accumulated over 1.5 million rows of data for internal reporting on a relational database, and used a relational database management system (RDBMS) to access their data. In order to create internal reports from the database, the Business Intelligence (BI) Manager had to spend approximately three to four hours daily researching, writing, and executing SQL queries. After extracting the appropriate data, the BI Manager was then tasked with several more hours of analysis and ultimately placing the data into a suitable format for presentation and distribution. Another challenge NCN faced was providing business users access to their data in a timely fashion. In order to create reports, employees first submitted IT tickets wherein a series of very specific instructions were provided and subsequently executed by a member of the IT staff. However, because new questions would often arise after the report had been delivered, employees would then have to resubmit an IT ticket requesting a revision of the original report. This delayed the efficacy of decision makers and created a backlog in the IT department.

AmberPoint provides solutions for governing and managing composite applications for enterprises, government agencies, and leading software companies. These clients run high-transaction systems, many of which are mission-critical and high-value. They rely on AmberPoint for reliable, comprehensive solutions for runtime governance of their composite applications. However, AmberPoint faced a decision about the data presentation layer of its service level agreement management function. The requirements called for Web-based information access for ad hoc reporting needs and formatted PDF report distribution for standardized uptime reports. If an OEM solution were to be selected, it needed to offer the flexibility of control that an internally developed one would have offered. AmberPoint sought to avoid limitations in an API that would impede the ongoing development of new core application features and their related information reporting needs. Lastly, the technology needed to be easy enough to implement and deploy that attendant costly consulting services could be avoided.

FPX's clients are in industries such as manufacturing, high-tech, and medical devices where products have myriad configurations, strict specification matching requirements, or regulatory demands. The users are sales departments who benefit from the time saved, greater order accuracy, and higher sales throughput gained from an automated workflow process for the configuration or selection of order components, the calculation of pricing based on complex volume discounts or bundles, and the generation of professionally crafted, branded quote documents. FPX did not want to perpetually expend resources on developing and maintaining reporting and publishing technologies when its core competency is developing an application that maximizes workflow efficiency and optimizes the user experience. As a provider of a SaaS application that is Java-based, FPX sought a Java-based publishing solution that could be easily integrated with its own. FPX required a very dependable, high-throughput publishing engine that had direct data access and modeling capabilities plus a strong design tool to generate ad hoc and templated documents in PDF and Excel formats.

The Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSFMC) was faced with the challenge of monitoring fish migrations through the Federal Columbia River Power System to provide valuable research information for the restoration of declining salmon and steelhead populations. The monitoring process involved recording large volumes of data which were automatically uploaded to the PTAGIS database every three hours. The challenge was how PSMFC reports were to be accessed, delivered and used across their disparate user base. Users access PTAGIS from remote locations and a wide variety of platforms including Windows PC, Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, Linux and others. The PSMFC needed a flexible, extensible, and easy-to-use solution.

eScholar provides solutions for collecting, cleansing, identifying, analyzing and reporting on the data that educators need for tracking and improving the performance of the complex enterprise of educating children. All of the data elements in eScholar systems are maintained at the finest, or lowest, level of detail and can be stored for an unlimited period of longitudinal history within any of the categories or domains of data. eScholar must integrate all of these data regardless of source. Therefore every fact collected by a school district that relates to an individual student’s performance remains tied to that individual. eScholar had several mandatory requirements for their reporting solution. First and foremost, it needed to offer an easy-to-use self-service environment that enabled their users who had a wide variety to technical skill levels, to access and report on their information. Secondly, it needed to be a low maintenance solution that integrated seamlessly with a wide variety of IT infrastructures and didn’t impact school districts with application downloads, plug-ins, or upgrades. It needed flexible, easily administered security, and had to be as affordable for schools with a couple of users, as well as districts with tens of thousands of users in widely distributed information system environments. eScholar selected InetSoft after evaluating many vendor solutions, as well as the open source products available today.

ArcSight’s award-winning ESM software acts as a command center for customers to discover and manage risks, correlate relevant event, operational and trend information, assess vulnerabilities and communicate compliance. The system collects and distills millions of enterprise-wide events down to the most critical information necessary for organizations to make informed decisions to protect their business and network assets. ArcSight required a flexible, low-maintenance, high-performance reporting tool that could be embedded into its software and easily integrate with many disparate data sources. It needed to report on thousands of devices, throughout widely distributed deployments, multiple firewalls and a wide assortment of third party vendor products. It also needed to be easy enough for customers of different technological skill levels to use, and still provide sophisticated graphical reports.

Data Solutions Inc. (DSI) needed a new reporting solution to replace their legacy system. Their robust data collection process and sophisticated scoring capabilities could not meet customer requirements without a reporting solution that was fully integrated. The solution needed to allow them to configure the components of their application suite for their customers as required, while considerably reducing report development and production cycles. The major challenge for Data Solutions was to integrate their application suite with a flexible J2EE based reporting tool that would allow them deliver custom real-time reports and surveys with the unique and distinctive layout and design for each customer’s specific requirements. Prior to implementing InetSoft’s Style Report™ software, Data Solutions relied on a proprietary legacy application that required all of the data be extracted from their core systems for reporting. This process added significant cycles to their development process and limited the turn around time for setting up and generating reports.

Pentagon Technologies needed to improve many operational aspects of its sales process that reporting and information management were a key part of. Prior to implementing the Style Report™ application of InetSoft’s Style Intelligence™ platform, simple databases had been created and were individually and manually accessed. Daily reports consisted of a spreadsheet that was converted to html for Web distribution. This labor-intensive process typically took 1-2 hours per day and when their analyst was out of the office, updates had to wait. Reporting errors were also a problem.

Before adopting InetSoft’s Style Scope, information delivery at Brenk Brothers mainly consisted of reports that were produced for monthly meetings with executive management. These relatively simple reports were produced by hand-running SQL queries, then exporting the data into Excel for manual modifications and chart building, then converting them into PowerPoint presentations for better display. The problem with this tedious process was that if something was not quite right with the report, or if a new informational need arose, they had to go all the way back to the drawing board, writing new SQL queries and restarting the process. This would sometimes have to be repeated several times for a single report. This stimulated a search for a BI tool that would make analysis and information delivery easier, for both the end user and the IT department. While Brenk Brothers did not want a tool that required large amounts of IT time for modifications, they also did not want to have to rely on a BI vendor to make modifications for them.

AgKnowledge is a cloud-based SaaS solution for medium and small fresh fruit and vegetable producers and distributors. The user portal utilizes InetSoft's Style Intelligence to deliver dashboards and reports, and to provide data models which save time, as they can be reused for different clients. Data is supplied to the solution using various mobile apps, which gather both manually entered data and data collected automatically by sensors on the agricultural and shipping equipment. All client data is stored in an AS/400 multitenant database. The developers at DiD have found InetSoft’s system of logical and physical data models to be a boost of efficiency when creating dashboards for different clients. A cross-platform for all their clients linked to common data models enables the same data models to be reused and modified for various clients, each with their own specific needs.