Schneider Electric, a leading provider of solutions that deliver business value to customers by enabling them to do more with less energy, was facing a challenge. The company's rapid growth demanded that its ability to maximize operational efficiencies aided by a dynamic BI platform was critical. It was increasingly clear that it needed to replace its enterprise reporting solutions. The company needed a business intelligence (BI) environment that could support the reporting needs of all types of users without sacrificing flexibility or ease of use. The company wanted to create reporting dashboards that could immediately generate custom reports through a self-service environment. They also wanted to use Active Reports and report-scheduling software to update and share information and create WebFOCUS alerts to manage by exception and automate key business processes.

SMACL Assurances, a mutual insurance association of local authorities, was faced with the challenge of complying with Solvency II regulations. These regulations required the company to maintain high-quality business data to reduce the risk of insolvency. The company was also dealing with redundant, erroneous, and duplicate data within its information systems, which could negatively impact policies, claims, marketing opportunities, customer support, and other essential business processes. The senior managers at SMACL Assurances launched a data governance initiative to improve the accuracy of key data sources. They aimed to go beyond mere compliance with Solvency II and improve the overall customer experience through timely, accurate, and relevant information exchanges.

The California Department of Health Services (DHS) was facing a challenge in making it easier for program managers to stay on budget by accelerating access to critical financial data. The department was using a variety of software applications to help managers stay on budget. However, the speed at which users could get the information they needed and react was not satisfactory. The department was using the California State Accounting and Reporting System (CALSTARS) – a mainframe accounting system developed in the early 1980s. CALSTARS is a powerful and comprehensive system, but its limited reporting functionality made it difficult for budget managers to obtain specific information when they needed it most. The department wanted to enhance its support services to keep up with the growth of the state.

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the third largest Native American tribe in the country, was facing challenges with timely and informed decision-making due to rapid business growth and expansive government services. During a previous data migration from a SunGard IFAS system to a J.D. Edwards financial system, a lot of important information had been intentionally left behind. As support for the legacy platform underlying the SunGard system became harder to come by, the IT department had to find a stable alternative to keep the data accessible for the foreseeable future. The initial objective with its new BI solution was to facilitate better reporting for the finance team.

ThyssenKrupp, a large steel producer, needed to formalize procurement processes, define purchasing-related objectives across multiple operating units, and accurately measure progress towards strategic goals. The company wanted to standardize and optimize processes as well as create formal structures for purchasing-related reporting across the entire group to enhance the techniques and metrics already in place. The company aimed to provide individual units with some leeway and flexibility within an overall strategic framework. The challenge was to ensure adherence to standardized procedures across the individual units to ensure synergies and optimize the use of suppliers and other resources.

Topco Associates, a grocery cooperative, was facing challenges in reducing product costs and increasing private label penetration to compete with larger national competitors. The company had a diverse back-end infrastructure with numerous departmental database applications and about two dozen off-line data marts serving specific needs. This made accessing basic data difficult. The grocery industry operates on extremely slim margins, averaging 1.5 percent to 2 percent, so operational expenses are always scrutinized and IT dollars must be spent carefully. While some consultants advised Topco to implement a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the Topco team was leery of embarking on such a project.

US TRANSCOM was operating with two legacy systems that were not integrated. The transport and treatment of wounded and sick soldiers was often met with errors and delays. Missteps during Operation Desert Storm highlighted the need for improved coordination of medical care for injured soldiers. In some cases, soldiers wounded in that conflict were directed to the wrong hospital or ended up in facilities that didn’t provide the correct specialties and treatments. The patient-movement process needed to be much more efficient, which led to the implementation of TRAC2ES.

United Automobile Insurance Company, a non-standard auto insurer based in Miami, Florida, was facing challenges with its previous reporting environment. The system lacked timely, detailed, and accurate information, putting the business users at a competitive disadvantage. For instance, an ad hoc report request for territory zip code data could take four to six weeks to complete. This delay was costly, and the lack of structure in the reports might not yield accurate data on the first attempt. The majority of research at United Auto was performed using legacy reporting systems, such as SQL and Guidewire reporting. The team needed a single view of the business along with a system that could deliver accurate reports, including an audit trail. This system would grow with the business and deliver information quickly.

United Stationers, the largest U.S. wholesaler of business products, faced a challenge of providing their traveling sales associates with access to customer and product sales data on the mainframe while eliminating high printing and distribution costs. The sales associates were in different locations, far from the distribution center where they could get access to information about the customer they would meet the next day. The company was going through a significant amount of paper as thousands of pages of mainframe reports were printed out of the Customer Analysis Reporting System (CARS) and distributed to field staff – two to three weeks after the end of each month. The recipients of this bounty then tried to extract the data they needed that month, data that would have been far more useful if they had received it two weeks earlier.

The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) provides public transportation services throughout six counties in the Wasatch Front of Utah. It operates fixed route buses, express buses, ski buses, three light rail lines (TRAX), a streetcar line (the S-Line), and a commuter rail train (the FrontRunner) from Ogden through Salt Lake City to Provo. The agency collects and analyzes a tremendous amount of data to keep trains on schedule, assess gaps in coverage, pinpoint the causes of delays, and improve transit operations for the city. However, business users formerly had to access data from multiple disparate sources, then analyze it manually in Excel – or wait for the IT department to create custom reports. This process was time-consuming and inefficient.

Utz Quality Foods, a snack food company, faced the challenge of keeping decision-makers informed of sales and distribution information, obtained daily from a widely dispersed sales force. The company operates on a Direct Store Delivery business model, marketing its products to stores and supermarkets in the mid-Atlantic United States. Utz also distributes snack food products that it buys from companies like ConAgra Foods. The company needed a system that allows managers to quickly gather and analyze current sales and distribution information.

Vacation.com, a leisure-travel marketing organization, was facing the challenge of providing targeted, qualified information to its internal agents and member agencies to support marketing campaigns, sales efforts, and periodic promotions. The company was using Microsoft Excel or SQL for creating most routine reports, which were then emailed to users. This process was inconsistent and often led to duplication of efforts. The staff wanted the ability to create interactive, parameterized reports to help users answer detailed questions themselves, minimizing the time and effort previously needed to obtain that information.

Victory Packaging, a leading North American distributor of end-to-end packaging and supply-chain solutions, was facing challenges due to rapid growth and increasing customer demands. The company's legacy PICK enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was unable to handle the growing demands, leading to inefficiencies. The company implemented a new wholesale distribution and supply-chain execution software package from International Business Systems (IBS), but lacked a business intelligence (BI) tool that could aggregate data from this system, analyze it, and deliver timely information to company decision-makers. The company needed a BI platform that could simultaneously access applications and combine data from AS/400 and Microsoft Windows platforms.

The Wendy’s Company, the world’s third largest quick-service hamburger company, was facing a challenge to modernize its back-office analytics systems in franchise and company-owned restaurants. The company wanted to integrate these systems with a new Point of Sale (POS) system and provide better information across the enterprise. The existing enterprise-reporting environment was based on batch processes that consumed lots of mainframe computing cycles. IT professionals had developed a number of information systems over the years, which stored information in unique ways. The old systems were designed limited for use at the restaurant level, rather than for the company’s senior leadership.

Workers Compensation Fund (WCF) is a Utah-based non-profit mutual insurance company financed entirely by premium payments from customers and investment income. The organization offers underwriting, safety, claims, and legal services to more than 20,000 businesses across the state. WCF also offers coverage to companies in other states, through third-party insurance companies located outside of Utah. WCF realized the importance of an enterprise reporting and analytics strategy, but struggled to provide users across the company with simple and intuitive access to its diverse information sources, including Adabas, Software AG, and other systems. After previous tools from Crystal Reports and Brio failed to deliver the needed integrations, WCF turned to the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform from Information Builders.

World Wide Technology (WWT) was facing a challenge with its existing business intelligence (BI) toolset, which comprised Oracle’s Discover, Portal, and Reports solutions used in conjunction with an Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The company was also dealing with a proliferation of hand-coded reports, as business users often requested “one-offs.” This put a strain on the IT department by requiring it to support more than 1,000 individual reports and dashboards. The company needed a major overhaul of its reporting infrastructure in order to remain competitive. They envisioned a BI environment that would enable business users to build, schedule, and automatically distribute their own reports and dashboards, allowing the IT team to focus on maintaining and organizing the data.

Yeshiva University, a distinguished institution of higher education, was facing challenges in improving cash flow, reducing procurement costs, and increasing the float on accounts payable spending. The university also wanted to create a real-time interface between researchers and equipment by obtaining data from legacy systems. Fiscal responsibility is crucial to the university’s mission of combining the best of contemporary civilization and knowledge with the ancient traditions of Jewish law and life. The more efficient Yeshiva can make its information systems, the more capably it can pursue its charter. This philosophy of fiscal responsibility motivated Yeshiva to purchase iWay integration technology from Information Builders.

The Institute for Elderly and Social Services (IMSERSO) is a Spanish agency that manages programs and services for elderly and dependent citizens. The agency was facing the challenge of strengthening government proposals for social services through rigorous information management. They wanted to create analytic applications that would empower agency workers to assist vulnerable citizens and monitor agency performance. The goal was to strengthen Spain’s social services by giving managers, analysts, and social workers an online environment to analyze the status of pressing situations and provide rapid responses to citizen inquiries.

Fuji Xerox Information Systems Co., Ltd. (FXIS) was facing a challenge in managing project profitability due to the simultaneous running of several development projects. The process of report generation was time-consuming as it was handled one request at a time to meet the needs of individual users. Necessary data had to be downloaded from SAP, aggregated by project, summarized into a report for each representative, and then distributed among the various departments. The company eventually created a dedicated database containing SAP information for analytical use, with a Microsoft Access-based system for retrieving that data. However, many challenges still remained.

Worldline, a global financial services company, needed to create a merchant-facing, self-service environment that could handle millions of daily transactions for hundreds of banks and thousands of merchants. The company wanted to empower its community with self-service analytic tools that would allow them to create statistics, summarize transactions, and analyze merchant activity with little or no help from IT. The company's activities are organized around three main areas: merchant services and terminals; mobility and e-transactional services; and financial processing and software licensing. With millions of daily transactions for hundreds of banks and thousands of merchants, Worldline needed a robust and efficient solution to monitor usage, summarize transactions, and generate statistics on merchant activity.

EllisDon, a $3.5 billion global construction company, was looking to streamline communication among various types of information systems, both on-premise and in the cloud. The company's Gate Three division was tasked with connecting cloud, on-premise, and mobile data sources as part of the Gate Three Enterprise Reporting Platform (ERP) system. One of the main challenges was integrating front-end project management functions with back-end financial functions on an IBM Power system. As more people started using smartphones and tablets to interact with enterprise information systems, EllisDon faced the challenge of exposing enterprise applications and legacy systems through mobile apps.