WebFOCUS Shifts the BI Paradigm at World Wide Technology
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- WebFOCUS
- Active Technologies
- Oracle ERP
- Oracle BI tools
Tech Stack
- Oracle WebLogic Server
- Linux
- Sun hardware
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Electronics
- Telecommunications
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
World Wide Technology (WWT) is a value-added reseller and systems integrator that provides technology products, services, and supply-chain solutions. The company moves billions of dollars of equipment each year for IT hardware giants such as HP, Dell, and Cisco. WWT has become a recognized industry leader, providing its global customers with technology products, services, and supply-chain solutions. The St. Louis, Missouri-based company recently helped Dell to consolidate its supply chain – reducing costs, boosting operational efficiency, and increasing visibility and control among its partners. The efficiency of WWT’s core business is highly dependent on information technology.
The Challenge
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.
The Solution
WWT decided to standardize on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to enable the creation of flexible self-service reporting solutions. They deployed Active Technology reports and dashboards to give individuals more autonomy and control. Active Technology reports can be downloaded and viewed within a browser, either online or offline. Users don’t need to install any software or even be connected to the reporting server to view the dashboards or to sort, summarize, and drill down into reports. WebFOCUS was clearly more flexible and cost effective than the alternatives. Because WebFOCUS can run on any platform, with any application server, and access any data, WWT’s hardware costs were much lower – outweighing core licensing costs. After training internal developers and establishing some architectural standards for the company, WWT began developing financial reporting applications.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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