A BI Strategy That’s Fit to Print
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform
- iWay DB2 adapter
- WebFOCUS Developer Studio
- WebFOCUS ReportCaster
Tech Stack
- SQL
- DB2
- Oracle
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Thomas Nelson is the world’s largest Christian-themed publisher and the sixth largest American trade publisher. With a global presence, including a recent startup in Mexico, Thomas Nelson publishes Bibles, books, and other Christian-themed materials, as well as general market business guides and cookbooks. Owned by private equity firm Kohlberg & Company, Thomas Nelson sells its products directly to retailers and through third-party distributors, such as Ingram Book Company, Levy Home Entertainment, Amazon.com, and various non-profit organizations. Thomas Nelson’s Live Events division, based in Plano, Texas, is the number one producer of live events in the Christian market. For an international publisher like Thomas Nelson, facilitating the rapid flow of information across business units is the key to ensuring peak operational efficiency.
The Challenge
Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, was facing challenges in accelerating decision-making and minimizing the burden on IT by helping users become more self-sufficient in addressing their own reporting requirements. The company's information architecture was quite diverse, made up primarily of SQL, DB2, and Oracle systems that recently replaced antiquated mainframe databases. Before the implementation of WebFOCUS, requests for reports could take several weeks to fulfill. Those lagging turnaround times often hindered the usefulness of the data for those who needed it, and created substantial delays in important decision-making activities. With an IT team of only 25 professionals available to address those requests, Thomas Nelson knew it needed to make its end users more self-sufficient.
The Solution
To overcome these challenges, the company implemented a comprehensive web-based reporting environment built on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform. Employees across the organization can now quickly and easily conduct detailed analyses about everything from sales orders and inventory levels, to pending book title releases. While a small base of users have the ability to generate their own reports through a simple and intuitive managed reporting environment, the majority of the company’s employees now have single-click access to a broad portfolio of online reports, or can have reports pushed directly to them via e-mail each day. A small team of developers in Thomas Nelson’s IT organization have leveraged WebFOCUS Developer Studio to create reports that pull data directly from these sources, and deploy them to the web. As a result, users at all levels across the company can access a wide array of critical corporate information in just minutes.
Operational Impact
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