With the vast amount of data that CTSI was pulling in each day through millions of invoices and bills, they wanted to find a system that could visualize this data for their customers and provide a place where they could track key trends in the shipping industry. They were not able to provide any kind of deep view into transactions and wanted to offer their customers the chance to see what was going on with their bills on a day to day basis. But taking it one step further, they needed a platform that their customers would actively sign into in order to track those trends. For Todd, getting their services personnel on board and regularly checking the data was a must in order to provide the best analytics and data information.

ES Originals faced significant issues with disparate and disconnected data, with nearly 1000 reports running against their ERP system. This led to logistical challenges, as reports were static and required new reports for any additional fields or selection criteria. The company needed a unified and standardized reporting system to streamline the process and reduce the number of reports. Additionally, salespeople had to bring hard copies of reports to client sites due to unreliable internet connections, and data from partners came in different formats, complicating the reporting process.

After a huge restructuring effort, FirstPort realized that its organizational decision making was in need of a serious overhaul. Monthly board meetings were led by senior department managers, all with conflicting agendas and data to match. At this point in time, no one could even say with any certainty the amount of properties FirstPort managed. According to Alex, “If you asked three people you’d get three different answers.” Alex recognized the opportunity to not only unify the organization’s decision making process, but lead the company into a golden era of insight. FirstPort was generating so much data from its day-to-day operations, customer queries, financial information, and new business opportunities that they were overwhelmed. They knew they could add value and make improvements for both the customers and company if they could just tap into the data. Alex and his team needed to drive improvements in data related reporting and decisions for customers and staff members, yet lacked the necessary tools and resources to do so, having only Excel and Powerpoint. To meet their objectives, they estimated that it would take up to one year of effort if they doubled the size of their existing BI team of five. Alex decided that the right direction for FirstPort was automating as much of the data cleansing and analysis as possible, and to focus the BI team’s talents on analysis rather than ETL. On top of this, Alex needed a vendor that could do all of this in a reasonable period of time - days or weeks, not months or years.

FTA’s member companies needed reliable data on producers to avoid human rights abuses and unsanitary conditions. The manual system for auditing and reporting data was inefficient, making it difficult to provide timely and accurate reports. Members had no way to independently access data, requiring internal resources to manually extract information from various sources. This lack of visibility and efficiency was a significant challenge for FTA.

With over five-billion records to analyze (and growing), Gianmaria's IT group had reached the limits of manual Excel reporting, realizing that Excel was not a scalable solution for its growing data size and scope. Analyzing Kamernet’s website data was fast becoming a burden on an already taxed IT department. Nearly twice a week, IT staff had to manually extract data from an SQL database, analyze the data, and transform the data in Excel reports. However, Excel reporting once again, proved limited. Employees were not able to arrive at quick, intuitive insights, and were having trouble visualizing their data, primarily reporting on revenue, website subscription data, and market-share information.

As the company grew, Online Commerce Group’s data become so large that, without a new generation Big Data Analytics solution, management couldn’t receive quality reports. The fast growth of the company meant that Data Manager Paul Auen was unable to run reports with large enough data sets to provide any real value to the business end. “Originally, we could do reports manually, but as the data sets got larger, the reports took longer and impacted the transactional database,” Auen recalled. “We were constrained between keeping the servers running or making it available for reports.” Online Commerce Group chose a popular business analytics tool, but it was too complex; Auen’s group was unable to run reports at the speed and frequency needed for the business. Quickly, the team abandoned and turned to Sisense. The company needed a solution that could: 1. Quickly analyze large data sets coming from multiple sources. 2. Provide drag-and-drop modeling and dashboard creation for business users. 3. Automatically generate reports and publish them to the company intranet. 4. Require a minimal capital investment and learning curve for use.

Paylogic considers itself a next-generation technological company, and its organizational structure and operations are highly automated. Instead of employing a standard monolithic ERP system (e.g., SAP), Paylogic has built its IT infrastructure using corporate-environment open-source standards. Automation is approached from a decentralized perspective based on this open-source IT backbone. The company uses different software packages for different functions and ties them together to form an enterprise collaboration platform. The result is impressive: Paylogic enjoys no-compromise IT functionality and flexibility with extremely low software costs. It was into this environment that the company sought to integrate a reporting and analytics tool. The company’s operational and historical data was consolidated into a homegrown data warehouse, based on a MySQL database. Paylogic was looking for a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with its existing system, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive.

Plastic Jungle’s business success is predicated by its ability to move faster than the competition. When the company brought in a new CFO in 2012, he aimed to deploy a data solution that would match the company culture. Speed, accuracy and agility were the key tenants for the company data approach. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t paint ourselves into corner by taking a traditional approach to data warehousing.” That meant a solution that could grow to massive amounts of data, and allow regular business users to work with data quickly without requiring a huge investment that would leave them beholden to the product.\n\nPlastic Jungle's BI requirements included the ability to:\n• Manage and sustain the entire operations aspect of Plastic Jungle’s data warehouse with little or no operating support from the engineering and IT staff\n• Allow business users to create any ad-hoc reports they required\n• Provide the abstraction layer between the schema and the metrics that the business sought\n• Refresh in close to real-time – a minimum of once per day, and ideally every couple of hours\n• Not incur a significant capital outlay

ProMarket required timely and accurate reporting and analysis of key metrics, such as sales, inventory, profit by product category, spoilage, and optimal order quantities for each store. The company was struggling to process very large amounts of data (over 40 million rows) from its centralized database. The data processing, transformation, and analytics were extremely time- and labor-consuming, making it impossible to generate some of the analytics required by management. Business partners of two leading BI vendors demonstrated their solutions to ProMarket and provided implementation proposals. However, ProMarket selected Sisense due to its ability to fully meet their requirements, faster customization of reports and dashboards, impressive data processing speed, and lower total cost of ownership.

Before implementing Sisense, alpharooms.com faced significant challenges in providing detailed and interactive reports and dashboards to various business functions. The existing tools, such as Excel and OLAP cubes, were not effective in building user-friendly dashboards or offering easy drill-down interfaces. Additionally, IT involvement was required for any modifications, making the process cumbersome and time-consuming. Lee Eckersley, Head of Business Analysis, had experience with other BI tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects, but found them too expensive and resource-intensive for the company's needs. The team needed a more efficient and cost-effective solution to handle their data analytics and reporting requirements.

Fiverr needed quick insights on growing data. The company wanted to connect data from MySQL with data from Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Analytics to better track user actions on their website and mobile app. As users increased, so did Fiverr’s data needs, making it larger and more complex with millions of rows a day from various sources. Despite using an internal big data system based on Hadoop, the data complexity made it difficult for the team to build reports and dashboards quickly. Fiverr’s senior BI director, Slava Borodovsky, emphasized the need for real-time results due to the dynamic nature of their data. The product department relied heavily on BI to determine their product roadmap, making the need for data more urgent as departments began understanding its impact on their success.

Trupanion faced challenges in managing and analyzing large volumes of data across multiple departments. The company needed a solution to track real-time performance, optimize marketing opportunities, and build accurate financial reports. Existing in-house solutions were time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies, leading to a need for a robust BI tool that could be easily used by non-technical users and deployed quickly.

GOAL Academy, an online charter school, faced challenges in effectively utilizing data to keep students on track and align staff with key performance indicators (KPIs). The school relied on various data resources like Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets, and different servers, which made it difficult to create a consistent format accessible online. The institution needed a modern tool to better visualize and understand the data, and to merge multiple platforms into one place. The goal was to find a web-based tool capable of processing data from different sources to help teachers make quick decisions in the classrooms and improve student retention and graduation rates.

Sonny explains that before Sisense, company resources would be invested in reigning in data and wrestling with the complicated process of aggregating, processing and delivering it to the client. “We would build a bunch of pivot tables in Excel on numerous tabs, and then we would give people an import function that would import the raw data so that they could see the dynamic reports in Excel. But there were a number of problems, for example Excel would limit the amount of rows in a report, or the report was slow, or people just didn’t know how to use it.” Sonny also mentions that another significant problem was the task of distributing the data reports to thousands of different clients. To keep the reports current and updated, clients had to manually re-import the data, and eventually customization requests demanded even more time and resources, per client. “Overall, there just wasn’t control over what was happening. On top of that, if I had to update the report configuration, I had to send out thousands of new Excel files that had all the pivot tables defined in them. And ultimately every customer would need us to modify their pivot tables. It was just a nightmare.”

In addition to the custom software that Businessolver had developed internally, they were also using several off-the-shelf technologies such as inContact for their service center; Salesforce.com for sales team and Sage for the accounting department. There was no unified method to tie those disparate data sources together and get an overall picture of the customer interaction. Users would get various exported files from various other users and load them up into MS Excel and analyze in a single location. Due to this lack of uniformity to data access, team members were constantly providing different results to the same question. The problem was not the volume of data but rather the disparate sources of it. It was critical to Businessolver to find and acquire a tool that would allow them to connect all their data sources across the enterprise. That way they would be able to have full confidence that their results were accurate no matter who was collecting the information, and that data could drive decision making based on facts and not based on feelings. Sony Sung-Chu is the Director of Applied Data Science at Businessolver and it was his task to find and test potential solutions. With his years working as a Business and IT Analyst, he came at the question from a very technical perspective. Sony also brought in Sara Johnson, the lead BI analyst for Businessolver, whose background is in economics, math and Business Intelligence. Johnson brought in the first data warehouse at Businessolver and was to be tasked as the internal BI expert, responsible for training and maintenance.

Casting Network’s data was being stored but not really seen, leaving the Sales and Business Development departments tracking KPIs manually. As the company started to expand internationally, the need to aggregate different data sets and evaluate the business on a global scale became even greater. Needing to access Google Drive documents, multiple Quickbook files and 35 SQL databases comprising over a billion rows of data, Nitika had her work cut out for her in pulling together a solution that met Glen’s directive.

Ignite Media processes massive amounts of data, maintaining approximately 3 TB of transaction, demographic, and media performance data. They had been building all their reporting internally using PHP and .Net, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to scale. Writing new reports from scratch to follow a 'hunch' could take weeks, making it impractical to test new ideas. The company had valuable data but lacked the resources to fully leverage it. Mazda Ebrahimi, the VP of Application Development, sought a solution that would allow them to produce results faster and more easily without sacrificing their intellectual property.

Integrous Marketing faced significant challenges in integrating data from multiple disconnected sources such as Adwords, Analytics, email marketing tools, and Salesforce. The process of manually gathering, cleaning, and joining datasets was labor-intensive and prone to errors. Additionally, generating visualizations from the data in Excel was time-consuming and often resulted in outdated and inaccurate information. The company needed a method to automate these steps and provide a better user experience, especially given the limitations in the types of reports and views that some tools provided.

Many companies today often have data that is so complex or distributed, it needs a dedicated team of specialists to clean and maintain it, and only then can a BI tool be useful. There’s a lot of work preparing complicated and dirty data, and many businesses need a simple way to prepare data that most BI tools on the market cannot provide. Mike saw that even after implementing a BI solution for customers. There was often such a steep learning curve, the customer would still be unable to build reports and dashboards independently. Mike’s customers typically come to him after they've failed with another BI solution. His company then takes on managing the client's internal data, some of which as been around for 10+ years, and is big, disparate, and dirty. His team would then wrangle the data together into a BI solution for the client. Mike saw that even after implementing a BI solution for customers, it often had such a steep learning curve, the customer would still be unable to build reports and dashboards independently. It was important that his customers could be self-sufficient, so he wanted to standardize on a tool that he knew would be a win for them.

Quentin Villon, a non-technical data analyst at Qualifa, faced significant challenges in managing and utilizing the vast amount of data collected by the company. Internally, he relied on Excel to manually build activity reports, a process that took two hours daily and resulted in a cumbersome 20MB spreadsheet. This method was prone to errors, with broken formulas and other issues, making it a nightmare to manage. The reports were also delayed, going out a day after the activity took place, which meant they could only acknowledge performance rather than influence it. Generating commission reports was even more time-consuming, taking two days each month. Externally, creating campaign insight reports for potential clients was a labor-intensive process that required several days of manual effort. These reports were crucial for client acquisition but were not reusable, adding to the inefficiency.

foodpanda faced significant challenges with their existing data warehouse, which was unable to efficiently handle terabytes of complex data from multiple sources. The limitations included a lack of data mining functions and the inability to affordably process large volumes of data. Additionally, foodpanda aimed to centralize data to promote transparency and democratization, reducing employee reliance on the BI department. They needed an intuitive, self-service BI solution to shift the focus from data collection to insights and strategy.

The decision to evaluate BI solutions came in the wake of what could be defined as a “cultural revolution” taking place in JDC: from siloed data, with each stakeholder holding on to his or her own data and only sharing it with others on a “need to know” basis, to a corporate culture of complete transparency of information that aims to make data available to everyone, and challenge them to make good use of it. The data itself was being stored in a Cobalt character-based CRM system running on the IBM RS/6000 platform, as well as Excel spreadsheets. This data consisted of sales, operational, utilization, financial and other data. Prior to Sisense, reporting was done with Excel and Access. JDC has been looking for some sort of dashboard software for roughly two years but did not find any product that could suit their needs, until they ran into Sisense in a user group in which two Sisense customers had presented it. The VP of Parts and Business Systems downloaded the trial version right there at the convention, and within two days was already publishing dashboards.

Pantechnik International faced significant challenges in managing and utilizing their vast and scattered data sources. The company struggled with a 'black hole' of largely untapped client data, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of overall performance, cost-effectiveness, and service level agreements (SLAs) of their carriers. Senior management lacked visibility and control over these metrics, which was further compounded by the data preparation nightmare of the ETL process. The company evaluated various solutions, including Qlikview, but found the 'buy before you try' business model unappealing. They needed an embedded BI software with a powerful backend capable of handling thousands of large, scattered datasets.

Blueline’s biggest problem was figuring out which budget allocations were connected to which sources of revenue. A single marketing campaign could bundle together various lines of business, making it hard to get a clear picture of the bottom line of promotional activities or to break down the revenue of product bundles by product and sub-product. The company lacked a way to combine data sources from different departments, leading to standalone reports that didn’t match up. This confusion resulted in inappropriate investments, reactive problem-solving, and missed business opportunities. As Blueline prepared to launch their mobile initiative, Nacer decided it was time to address the problem once and for all, anticipating high volumes of transactions that could cause enormous problems if not managed properly.

EEG had to structure the data to have the functionality and flexibility at an interface level so that they could easily deploy it to any event type and use consistent tools to report on the data. That is where the problem arose: though the data was being collected, the data created data dumps that were cumbersome to understand and not structured to produce easy or accurate data analysis. After Adam sifted through the data dumps of a number of their clients, he realized that some data just couldn’t be connected in a traditional reporting environment - creating gaps of what they could report. After talking to a longtime client, he found that many of their clients were forced to manually pull data and reports together - and were spending a significant amount of time doing it. Adam attempted to solve the problem by doing data analysis for his clients internally and sending out the reports. But, for Adam to do that internally, he had to pull the data out of Salesforce, cobble it together, create reports and charts in Excel and then email them out. Every report would have taken weeks at least, and the clients wanted to see this data frequently and quickly, so it wasn’t feasible.