Heartland Financial, a multibank holding company, was growing rapidly through the acquisition of small regional banks. This led to a jumble of disparate information systems and data repositories, making it difficult to create consistent reports. Compliance and audit teams frequently experienced continuity issues, and reports from different departments using the same data sometimes had conflicting totals. Business users were sidetracked verifying the accuracy of the data rather than using it to help customers resolve problems. Regulatory challenges were putting a much greater emphasis on day-to-day analytics and reporting. The board of directors needed consistent monthly and quarterly basis for sound operational decision-making.

Helzberg Diamonds, a fine jewelry retailer with 233 stores across the U.S., needed to build a robust business intelligence environment connected to a variety of data warehouse platforms. The company wanted to process and ensure the quality of huge quantities of point-of-sale (POS) data and provide up-to-date information for store managers and decision-makers. The company’s existing reporting tools were unable to seamlessly access information in a new database and make it readily available to those who needed it most. The company was spending an hour a day manually pulling data from disparate sources to create sales dashboards for regional managers. Once completed, each of those regional managers would take those dashboards, manipulate the information they contained in Excel or other formats, and distribute the results to each store manager. Every morning, 35 highly paid regional managers were spending their first hour sorting through Excel spreadsheets, a huge drain on productivity.

IBI Group, a globally integrated architecture, planning, engineering, and technology firm, faced challenges due to its rapid growth through acquisitions. This growth led to a diverse set of information systems, disconnected processes, and islands of information. The company's primary asset is its human capital, measured in billable time. Managers had to constantly monitor staff capacity and utilization to maximize their professional resources. However, these efforts became progressively more difficult as the company acquired numerous service organizations throughout the world. The company needed a way to quickly view consolidated information about financial activity and workforce productivity.

ICA Fluor, a leading industrial engineering construction company in Mexico, was facing the challenge of consolidating information from multiple sources into one repository and making the data available to approximately 70 senior managers. As the company grew in size, the volume of data generated also increased exponentially. The company's executives were looking for a new business analytics system with powerful capabilities for frontend business intelligence (BI) and back-end data management. They wanted to develop a user-friendly analytics environment that streamlines access to current project information and extends self-service reporting functionality to HR, procurement, and other departments.

Informa plc, a multinational publishing, conference, and information management company, was facing a challenge with its massive amount of data. The company generates a large amount of data through its various divisions, including Global Events, Academic Publishing, and Business Intelligence. The database serves a global audience and contains 13 million corporate addresses and about 35 million personal records. However, every country has its own way of listing addresses, zip codes, locations, street numbers, and other identifying information. This led to a problem of data inconsistency and duplication. The quality of the information could vary by source, and over time information ages and loses its relevance. Problems arise if the data is not periodically updated or removed.

Insperity, a leading Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in the United States, was seeking to standardize on an in-house business intelligence solution and expand its online reporting environment for clients. The company wanted to offer intuitive enterprise business intelligence technology that would allow users to create their own report procedures and data access routines. This would also be used to develop a menu-driven reporting environment that simplifies reporting for customers and novice users. The challenge was to find a solution that could streamline operations to reduce costs, scale affordably to meet future usage demands, and improve customer service by providing expanded, standardized reporting capabilities.

International Car Operators (ICO) is a leading company in the material-handling industry, specializing in loading and unloading cargo ships. They offer a broad range of logistics services related to terminals, vessels, shipping agencies, vehicle support, and customs clearance. The company faced a challenge in offering a system that would facilitate the efficient processing and sharing of information between entering ships, material-handling and logistic service providers, and customers. They needed a system that could collate all available information and present it to customers in the most convenient and accessible way possible. The information should also be available to support key business processes.

IFDS clients lacked self-service reporting and analysis tools that could visualize disparate data in a meaningful way. In many instances, clients had to hire a third-party firm to translate raw transaction data into a format that was useful for reporting and analysis. IFDS set out to eliminate the need for third-party solution providers by providing business intelligence (BI) tools that its clients can use themselves. To achieve this transformation and create a dashboard-driven environment for reporting and analysis, IFDS used technology and services from Information Builders.

Online businesses across various industries are constantly battling online fraud. The challenge is to combat this fraud without compromising the consumer experience with obtrusive technology. iovation, a company based in Portland, Oregon, aims to protect online businesses and their customers against fraud and abuse. It also identifies trustworthy customers through a combination of advanced technologies known as device identification, shared device reputation, device-based authentication, and real-time risk evaluation. To provide customers with greater visibility into fraudulent actions, and to differentiate itself from its competitors, iovation recently extended its fraud prevention solutions with powerful analytics and business intelligence (BI) functionality from Information Builders.

The JOC Group, a provider of global intelligence for trade, transportation, and logistics professionals, was facing a challenge in providing its clients with better Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics to make critical business decisions. As the competitive landscape for data services evolved, decision-makers at JOC Group realized they needed to improve the company’s BI capabilities to preserve market leadership. They examined offerings from several software vendors and chose Information Builders for its complete spectrum of technology and services for data integrity, data integration, and BI.

Kempen & Co, an independent Dutch merchant bank, was facing challenges in synthesizing new and old information into a cohesive reporting environment that simplifies account management, risk management, and financial reporting. The company was operating in a highly regulated business environment requiring constant oversight by managers. The company's activities required comprehensive reporting tools that let employees drill down into current information about customers, profitability, and myriad operational details. However, Kempen’s managers had problems accessing information from an HP Alpha OpenVMS system.

LifeWatch, a provider of remote heart-monitoring and home sleep-testing services, was faced with the challenge of complying with new governmental requirements to support new EDI standards for medical claims processing. Failure to comply would result in fines and payment delays. The company had to build integration technology to comply with the new standards by the government deadline. LifeWatch processes medical claims for devices and patient services with more than 10 different insurance claims clearinghouses, each with its own unique trading partner agreements. The company used electronic data interchange (EDI) technology to process charges using a 4010 format established by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but a recent updated HIPAA standard now requires healthcare organizations to support the EDI 5010 format.

Lipari Foods, a regional wholesale food distributor, was in need of a self-reporting tool that would provide employees and customers better access to transactional data. The company wanted a self-service BI environment that could provide visibility into every step of a process. Prior to purchasing Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform, Lipari’s reporting practices consisted of manual, “one-off” processes in which an IT professional created a specific report in response to a specific business request. Lacking a consistent enterprise strategy, the IT department found itself producing hundreds of unique reports. A massive amount of transactional data was available, but the company lacked self-service reporting tools that would let non-technical workers access, sort, summarize, filter, and visualize the data.

Lloyd’s of London, a leading insurance market provider, faced the challenge of implementing a cost-effective, reliable upgrade of FOCUS with minimum risk in transferring its business-critical information. In 1995, new legislation required Lloyd’s to collateralize all its letters of credit and place funds into collateral accounts. Previously, syndicates were not required to put up any cash when setting up a letter of credit. In the late 1990s, Lloyd’s began its shift to a new operating platform based on Windows XP and an ethernet. Lloyd’s also expanded its distribution chain and required a system that could generate new payment request types and settle debits and credits with brokers outside the UK. Lloyd’s saw the opportunity to evaluate the business intelligence (BI) solution market and replace its legacy system with one that best suited its needs.

Lutheran Life Communities, a non-profit senior living organization, was facing administrative challenges due to its rapid growth. The company's data was spread across seven disparate information systems, making it difficult for directors and department heads to obtain a unified view of the business and access the information they required to support day-to-day decision-making. The company sought a business analytics solution that could consolidate information about daily operations and present it to business users in an actionable way.

Maitland, a global provider of fund administration, legal, tax, fiduciary, and investment advisory services, was seeking a general-purpose software environment that could simplify data integration, data quality, application integration, and B2B integration for SWIFT message processing. The company wanted to link its trading and settlement systems and orchestrate new interfaces to internal and external systems. The challenge was to find a platform that could read, write, and enrich SWIFT transactions while shielding clients from the complexities of the underlying computing environment. The company also wanted to enable straight-through processing (STP) by setting up SWIFT-based messaging for Maitland’s external trading partners.

Mark Anthony Group, a leading alcoholic beverage company in Canada, was facing challenges in streamlining the flow of information governing order entry, warehouse management, billing, and shipping/receiving operations within the company and to external partners. The company wanted to extend enterprise resource planning (ERP) automation from headquarters to the warehouse to keep the entire workflow electronic. However, even after implementing Microsoft BizTalk Server to exchange communications across its extended organization, the ability to quickly and seamlessly share information between its ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) systems continued to pose quite a challenge.

MasterCard’s previous reporting tools required a detailed understanding of data, and a restrictive licensing policy that limited their extensibility to multiple business domains. The company needed to develop targeted reporting solutions for many parts of the business, enabling an unlimited set of BI assets to be delivered to employees and customers. The challenge also involved the nature of the reports that people requested. Information Builders developed a proof-of-concept (POC) to validate how its BI tools could fulfill these requirements. MasterCard especially liked WebFOCUS Active Technology, which permits people to manipulate the significant amount of data that is distributed with each report.

Steve McVeigh, a cotton grower in Dalby, Queensland, was operating two geographically separated properties with a paper-based administration system. This system was inefficient and made it difficult to access critical information when needed. The geographical separation between Steve’s two farming aggregations at Nandi and Warra made the job of managing them harder and communication was key to making it work. Steve explains: “I live on one of the properties myself and our farm manager Jake Murray on the other, but of course I still drive back and forth between them both a lot.

Hough Farms was using a legacy farm management software but when that company was sold to a large input supplier, they wanted to ensure their farm data was stored with an independent party. They were also looking for a solution with better reporting capabilities to make data-driven decisions to help manage the business. The farm management system they had initially adopted was bought by a Big Ag company, which changed the stakes for them. They felt their data should be safe and secure with an independent party and realized their data would be used for different purposes that don’t necessarily align with their needs and preferences. At the same time, they also started to realize that this system didn’t really offer them the kind of reporting that they needed in order to make informed and data-driven decisions.

Erin Vale Farming, a 7,500-hectare farming operation in Australia, was facing communication challenges due to its large scale. The operation is run by Matt and Dan Lane along with several staff members and an agronomist. The increasing difficulty in communication among the different stakeholders was becoming a significant issue. The size and variety of the farming operation necessitated a streamlined communication system to avoid costly mistakes. The need for accurate data and reports for budgeting and cost control was also a major concern for the operation.

Barenbrug, one of Australia’s largest seed companies, was struggling with data management. The company was dealing with double handling of information and had difficulty tracking all activities performed on each trial. The agronomists at Barenbrug were unable to access all historical information when needed and had to go back to their office and sift through paper records to find the required information. This was a time-consuming process and often led to delays and inefficiencies.

Rural Management Strategies (RMS), an agricultural consultancy firm, was using a legacy system that was not delivering the efficiency and real-time data sharing they required. They wanted a system where they could share data rapidly and where their clients could see and update the plan to actuals in real-time. This would allow the RMS advisor to follow exactly what was happening in the field. The challenge was to find a system that would allow for efficient data management, especially from plans to actuals.

Brendan and Claire Booth started farming as first-generation farmers in 2012. They soon realised that as they didn’t have generations of experience and knowledge to fall back on, they needed to work as smart and hard as possible. In order to achieve this, they knew they had to collect and use all important farm data to their advantage. They collect a lot of data ranging from soil moisture probes and weather stations to pivot behaviour, soil data and in-field data; they quickly recognised that they needed a better way of sharing this with their team so they can all benefit from the data.

Allan Brothers, a large fruit growing, packing, and shipping operation, manages over 700 individual blocks of apples, cherries, and grapes in their Yakima Valley Orchards. They needed a sophisticated digital solution to track their inputs and operations due to the sheer size of their operation. They wanted to become more accurate with their inputs, such as water for irrigation, fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. They also needed a solution that would help them provide the exact amount of water their trees need for optimal production, rather than over-watering because they can. The first thing they needed was a good digital solution that helps them track those inputs that they have applied.

Alturas Ranches, a diverse farming business in North-eastern California, was facing challenges with their data management. They used to use field averages for their seasonal reports, but the limited scope of the dataset available to them meant they were not able to use the data to influence their decision-making processes. The inaccuracy of the data, especially with alfalfa hay and using one stack yard for multiple fields, made them realize the need for a better dataset and the ability to extract solid intelligence from this dataset.

CQ Ag Services were looking for a platform they could use to improve both internal and external communication. They wanted to be able to store their observations and recommendations in such a way that all agronomists and their clients have access. The daily operations at CQ Ag evolve around the individual growers’ needs at different times in the season and how they can be best serviced. Seasonality and rapidly changing demands are common in Central Queensland due to soil-moisture availability, irrigation-water availability and many other factors.

Colusa County Farm Supply’s (CCFS) was introduced to Agworld by one of their growers. The grower showed them how Agworld could help farmers and agronomists improve their chemical and fertility management forecasts. The agronomists at CCFS were interested in how Agworld could help them collaborate with their clients and organize chemical and fertility management to create budgets. They decided to trial Agworld and were impressed with the benefits it offered.

Warwick and Di Holding were searching for a system they could use to keep accurate records for their farming operation without creating a large additional burden of work. They also wanted to be able to see accurate financial cropping results for their operation, Pontara Grain, in order to guide them in making more profitable decisions in the future. They were looking for a cropping system that can minimize the effect of wet winters and waterlogging on shallow soils with low water holding capacity while not carrying a large yield penalty in dry years.

Nathan Soulsby, an agronomist with AGnVET, needed to provide integrated agronomy service to BettaCrop clients, which includes their planning, budgeting, scouting and record keeping. Rolf Malmo, a local grower and one of Nathan’s clients, was new to cropping and needed visibility into his financial performance that he could also take to his bank and other service providers. The soil around Henty tends to have a low pH, which forces growers like Rolf to be more creative. They also have a big ryegrass problem in the area. Mixed cropping and livestock operations tend to manage this quite well, but they needed a way to analyze and compare different strategies.