Ace Hardware, the largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative in the U.S., was facing a challenge of managing the vast amount of information required to keep the company’s supply chain running smoothly. The company needed to extend decision-making capabilities to a large base of users via data analytics capabilities that were easy to access, integrate, and use. The company was looking for a decision-making platform that could support thousands of users while easing development and offering robust self-service capabilities. The platform needed to be 'ERP-savvy' and able to integrate various types of data into intuitive charts, graphs, and reports.

AcuSport, a leading distributor of hunting and shooting products, was facing challenges with its existing system for exchanging business documents with partners and integrating its internal information systems. The company was using custom interfaces to exchange item information, pricing updates, inventory status, purchase orders, and other documents. As business volume increased, developing these interfaces became increasingly complex and time-consuming. The company was also using a packaged electronic data interchange (EDI) system from Gentran that was cumbersome and expensive. AcuSport was looking for a solution that would allow it to quickly integrate trading-partner documents with its software applications.

Adif, a railway systems administrator based in Madrid, Spain, manages enormous amounts of information from various sources. The organization had hundreds of applications within the organization, with the same kind of information repeated in different systems. This complicated the information-collection process and created confusion and inaccuracy. Adif needed a solution that would provide a single point of access to information from various systems and applications. The organization wanted to build a centralized, Oracle-based data warehouse and use robust BI to provide company-wide reporting and analysis against that information.

Ainsworth, a heating, ventilation, electrical, and mechanical services contractor, was struggling with the rigidity of canned reports from its JD Edwards ERP system and a lack of flexibility in its development tools. This was not satisfying users’ constant requests for information. The company needed a solution that would make it easier for developers and end users to create reports, manipulate data, and share information in the company’s ERP system. The company wanted to construct a data warehouse using ERP transaction data, and then build user-friendly dashboards that deliver real-time information about the business.

Air Canada, the largest airline in Canada, was seeking to improve its services by making it easier for consumers and corporate customers to purchase, book, and manage travel, as well as track all associated expenses through a self-service reporting portal. The challenge was to build an online reporting environment that was simple enough for customers to use, yet sophisticated enough to handle sensitive corporate data in a secure, reliable way. The company also wanted to extend powerful BI capabilities to its premier customers. The IT department was tasked with this project, which had to be completed outside of the usual IT channels.

AJ Logistics, a premier provider of custom warehousing and logistics services, needed to enable its clients to simultaneously track multiple projects, obtain status updates, issue commands, and initiate complex workflows via mobile devices. The company operates in a highly competitive market and must differentiate itself by delivering superior service and support to its clients. This includes keeping them fully informed of the status of their projects by allowing them to easily monitor deliveries, inventory, and other critical activities. The company processes 1,000 to 2,000 projects every year and needed to streamline the execution of many simultaneous projects.

Alpha Bank, one of the largest financial services companies in Greece, found itself vulnerable during the global economic downturn. The bank needed to retain liquidity and preserve good banking relationships with its largest customers, while also responding to daily requests from regulators at the Central Bank of Greece. However, the MIS department was spending an inordinate amount of time accessing information and generating reports using Microsoft Access and Excel. The manual system for creating reports involved consolidating information from 40 different information systems into Microsoft Access databases, and then creating ad hoc reports and financial statements. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, with the team spending more time looking for data rather than gaining insights.

Amerisure, a leading provider of property and casualty insurance, wanted to enhance company performance by leveraging the intelligence in their enterprise data to improve profitability and foster a more analytics-driven culture. The company's data was complex and spread across disparate systems. They needed a framework that would enable them to harvest the intelligence within that data. The company also wanted to provide its agency partners with analytics about their accounts that they otherwise would not have access to. Amerisure was also looking to make these capabilities mobile to further enhance customer service and increase client longevity.

Ameritas, a company offering a wide range of insurance and financial products and services, was struggling with accessing, presenting, and analyzing key business information from a diverse back-end infrastructure. This included data from a mainframe administration system that encompasses sales, commissions, customer service, underwriting, and actuarial data. The company lacked a cohesive way to manage this data, which was crucial for making informed business decisions. Furthermore, Ameritas wanted to provide its 'information consumers' with an easy-to-use process for analyzing and retrieving information from the repository. It needed a solution that would allow access to information about company operations, products, and customers and make it accessible not only to IT professionals, but also to business users and policyholders.

Apollo Vredestein, a Dutch tire producer, was facing the challenge of producing a consolidated reporting system that could convey data from a multitude of sources in a consistent way. This was to simplify reporting, analytics, and information delivery throughout the enterprise. The company had a best-of-breed IT strategy, using a combination of packaged and homegrown systems to meet its business needs. However, this made it difficult to achieve a single, consolidated view of critical information for decision-making purposes. The company needed a solution that could address this challenge and provide a comprehensive business intelligence platform for reporting, analyzing, and presenting business information.

Appvion, a manufacturer of paper coating and chemical products, was facing issues with information access and quality. Different departments were using different tools and data, leading to inconsistencies and a lack of governance over data usage and sharing. Information was scattered across numerous applications, warehouses, marts, and spreadsheets. The company was in search of a single platform that could meet the needs of all its departments and users, support its data warehousing strategy, preserve data quality, and enable robust analytics.

Aqua Clara, a leader in the water delivery industry, was facing challenges with its main operating system which only covered sales operations management. If partner companies wanted to aggregate and/or analyze information from a certain viewpoint, they needed to obtain the data in CSV format and process it manually. Most of the company’s partners are small businesses that cannot afford technicians to handle data processing. Additionally, these cumbersome aggregation and analysis processes were a huge drain on Aqua Clara’s resources. Monthly sales reports from partners were printed and distributed in hard-copy formats, so data needed to be rekeyed into the main system to generate related reports. Results were typically not available until, at the earliest, half a month later – a delay that negatively impacted the company’s ability to provide advice and guidance to its partners.

Arcadia Group, the UK's largest clothing retailer, recognized the need for a robust business intelligence platform to improve decision-making and business performance. The retail industry has become fiercely competitive, and consumer loyalty is no longer guaranteed. To gain a competitive edge, Arcadia sought to access and analyze accurate, consistent, and timely information. In the late 1990s, Arcadia embarked on a major data warehouse project with IBM to centralize information for its international, group finance, and branch merchandising teams. By 2005, Arcadia had created a robust, well-structured data warehouse for its central operations, supplemented by a business intelligence (BI) tool providing reports to around 200 users. However, Arcadia recognized the need to extend the solution across the enterprise to include the buyers and merchandisers of its eight trading brands. These teams were using legacy applications, which had become inflexible and restrictive in Arcadia’s international strategy, such as lacking multi-channel access or multi-currency functionality.

Associated Food Stores (AFS) was facing the challenge of eliminating haphazard, inaccurate one-off reports. The IT staff was burdened with dealing with individual requests for information, which was not only time-consuming but also costly. The company wanted to reduce the cost of providing relevant data to users and automate analytics, report development, and information distribution. The existing system was causing confusion about which numbers were accurate as users loaded the results into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to further manipulate the data. The company was also dealing with inconsistencies throughout the organization due to the use of multiple reporting technologies.

Associated Wholesalers, Inc. (AWI) is a cooperative food distributor that provides flexible business and retail services to promote the growth and profitability of its member stores. AWI began in the late 1950s to help a group of independent grocers compete with larger chains, but now serves thousands of retailers and earns close to $2.5 billion in revenue. AWI buys, warehouses, and resells grocery items to its members and offers a wide variety of programs and services to help them run their businesses. Independent retail stores that buy into the co-op earn dividends from AWI’s profits; enjoy greater purchasing power; and benefit from AWI’s distribution, marketing, and reporting services. AWI offers retail pricing systems, advertising programs, and point-of-sale business intelligence (BI) solutions based on each store’s transaction logs, which AWI loads into its reporting environment every day. Given that grocers are continually driven by a “freshness factor,” AWI has to provide its clients with up-to-the-hour data in order to deliver valuable insight. Ultimately, the company’s search for a BI environment capable of handling this challenge led Morton and his team to deploy Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI and iWay Software integration solutions to supply accurate data and insight to its members.

AutoZone, the leading retailer and distributor of automotive replacement parts and accessories in the U.S., needed to roll out a flexible analytics environment to thousands of stores without burdening field workers with custom software or complex report procedures. The company wanted to work with its existing computers, databases, and information systems to create a self-service reporting and analytics system that casual users could adopt quickly. In the past, the IT department generated most of AutoZone’s corporate reports at the Store Support Center. While these reports were adequate for monitoring basic activities, managers discovered they needed additional reporting capabilities as the company grew. They also wanted better utilities for drilling into and analyzing data. They envisioned an analytics environment that could reveal operational metrics on demand, while also serving users in the field.

Avatar Solutions, a company that provides patient satisfaction, employee, and physician surveys to more than 600 hospitals and 13,000 providers, was faced with the challenge of streamlining reporting, bolstering analytics, and improving data quality. The company needed to ensure that its clients continued to receive accurate performance data as the foundation for quality improvement initiatives. The healthcare industry was rapidly evolving, and with the passage of the U.S. Affordable Care Act, an expanding array of government regulations and quality metrics began to influence Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. For example, patient satisfaction scores became a part of a hospital’s Total Performance Score (TPS), which measures how well healthcare organizations perform with respect to important dimensions of care and service – directly impacting their Medicare reimbursement dollars. These industry dynamics made it even more important for Avatar to develop flexible data management and reporting procedures.

As Banco Interacciones expanded, the board of directors wanted to centralize its monitoring and analysis operations via a web-based portal with an array of next-generation dashboards. The system would let managers and key stakeholders access detailed information pertaining to the bank’s activity, as well as help the commercial banking department to achieve its weekly performance goals. The bank carried out a series of initiatives to address these issues, implementing various reporting tools and dashboards, but the results fell short of expectations. As a result, the bank’s Administrative and Finance Corporate Board decided to embark on an ambitious IT project to select a business intelligence (BI) tool that could deliver this functionality.

Basler Versicherungen, a leading Swiss insurance provider, faced several operational challenges. Among them was limited visibility into the performance of the more than 650 brokers who sell its insurance products and drive more than 30 percent of the company’s revenue. Basler’s staff also lacked a complete view of customer activity, which hindered service delivery and prevented them from identifying cross-selling opportunities. The company needed to improve access to vital and timely information contained in its corporate systems. Before these new applications were introduced, employees were struggling to get the information they needed to perform their jobs more efficiently. They were forced to manually gather data from seven or more back-end systems, and then consolidate that information into Excel spreadsheets, where they could conduct further manipulation and analysis.

BBVA, a global financial institution, faced the challenge of summarizing the activity of 700 auditors in 13 countries in a small number of dashboards and reports. They needed to consolidate operational data from internal audit activity into an accurate source of information. The internal audit department was seeking autonomy from the IT department. They had been using a Microsoft Excel reporting solution that generated balanced scorecards to summarize audit team performance, but that solution did not scale well. As the number of scorecards increased, more manual intervention was required, which taxed the resources of the IT department and the internal audit team. In addition to issues with the Excel solution, rapid company expansion motivated BBVA’s senior management team to streamline the company’s global auditing operations.

Belcan Corporation, a provider of engineering, staffing, and other innovative outsourcing solutions to the manufacturing industry, was facing a challenge in improving access to critical business information contained in JD Edwards systems running on an IBM i platform. The company had received a request to provide access to information residing in its JD Edwards World systems. Although the requests were met, the implementation did not provide the flexibility end users needed, nor did it support all platforms required in today’s changing technology environments. The company needed a solution that could streamline real-time data access across multiple platforms.

BGL Group, a UK-based financial services group, was seeking to improve its communication with customers and partners by providing better insights more frequently. The company undertook a strategic review of its existing Management Information strategies and systems, as well as the future demands these would experience. The review identified key goals around improving the delivery of information to partners, customers and users throughout the business, as well as improving the efficiency of the development requirements that would support this. The group-wide platform had to meet the very different demands for each user group. With executives pulling ad hoc reports in meetings, super users manipulating data to discover new insights and partners drilling down into their own information, customised apps and ultimately secure access to the right data for each user was vital.

The Bank of Montreal was facing a challenge where business analysts and managers were spending a significant amount of their time going through paper reports to collect and rekey information. The bank needed a solution that would provide managers with more timely data and better access to information. The bank was exploring ways to deliver information to managers electronically, but all of the proposed solutions had high price tags. The bank's Monthly Progress Monitor was a mainframe system that generated reports from branches across Canada. The finance department would review the numbers at the end of each month and about 10 days later, thick paper reports with balance sheets, income statements, and other reports would start to roll off the printer. Performance data for each branch would be mailed or couriered to the branch manager, while district managers would try to cull data from bundles of reports for further analysis and comparison. Those results would be available 15-20 days after the end of the previous month and often required managers to manually input data from paper reports into spreadsheets or call bank headquarters to get additional information that wasn’t in their reports.

Bolloré Logistics, a full-service logistics company, was facing challenges in maximizing its financial and operational performance due to inadequate monitoring and control of HR policies and related expenses. The company's HR expenses accounted for nearly 60% of its operating budget. However, the company lacked the ability to retrieve consistent data and efficiently track key aspects of their day-to-day operations. The financial management team could only see an overall view of HR expenses and had no way to determine how much of those costs were allocated specifically to staff salaries and other areas. HR had limited visibility into its operations and was forced to rely on Excel for generating reports and analyzing critical data, a process that was time-consuming and redundant. In addition, operational management had no monitoring of their own – they were dependent on the data provided by financial management and HR to measure their most important indicators.

Brant Community Healthcare System (BCHS) was facing challenges in reporting and data analysis due to the manual extraction of data from MEDITECH. The time-consuming process of creating Excel spreadsheets and cleaning data was not adding value to the leaders as the data was not available in a timely fashion or interpretable to inform day-to-day decision-making. Furthermore, the creation and management of reports required a minimum of two full-time employees. BCHS initially sought a way to make reporting easier. But over time, the organization realized it needed a solution that went beyond reporting, to also encompass data quality and the integration of its back-end systems.

Brotherhood Mutual, an insurance company that works exclusively with churches and related ministries, was facing the challenge of devising a cohesive enterprise reporting strategy without going through a lengthy data warehouse development effort. The company was running its business on an IBM iSeries platform and depended on Lotus Notes for many of its workflow and Web applications. However, the platform's RPG-based reporting tools were not sufficient for the company's needs. Business users had to wait for a data warehouse to be completed before they could start using the reporting tools, and they could only access dated information that was periodically staged to the warehouse. This approach also put a heavy burden on the IT group, which had to conduct massive database development projects.

The European capital markets have been hampered by national origins and traditions, which have resulted in high costs and inefficiencies for cross-border clearing and settlement. Each country typically has its own centralized and integrated structure, or central securities depository, to carry out this service. Handling cross-border settlements means the clearinghouse must deal with institutions that have different payment systems, message formats, and policies to handle trades. These differences have hindered market globalization. Euroclear, the world’s largest settlement system for domestic and international securities transactions, developed the Secure Settlement Engine (SSE) to consolidate five disparate processing platforms into one and provide a Common Communications Interface (CCI) to serve as the single gateway interface for clients to access all Euroclear settlement services. To develop the CCI, Euroclear needed a strong partner to build the communications network and provide secure messaging services for its clients. BT was selected as one of the key providers to facilitate two-way client communication through secure gateways.

Bulova Corporation, a leading manufacturer of watches and clocks, was facing a challenge in providing its users in sales and other areas of the business with faster, better access to vital data in JD Edwards systems. The company was looking for a way to make data from its JD Edwards systems more accessible to employees throughout the company. Sales representatives were heavily dependent on the IT team for more frequent reports about orders, invoices, and other sales-related matters. The company also faced issues with creating new customers due to the lack of automation between JD Edwards and the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. Additionally, point-of-sale reporting was a labor-intensive process, with data from various formats being compiled by hand into reports before being delivered to management.

Bunzl Australasia, a leading specialist distribution group, was facing challenges due to its heavy transaction volume and low margins which demanded high efficiency. The company's three primary business units each used different enterprise resource and planning (ERP) systems, making it difficult to obtain visibility into daily sales activity and other operational functions throughout the enterprise. This disparity in systems was hindering timely access to critical data, thus affecting the company's decision-making process.

Business Connexion, a leading provider of innovative business solutions based on information and communications technology (ICT), was facing the challenge of providing faster access to accurate data for complex reports to meet governance rules and improve efficiency. The company needed to allow users across the organization to extract information for improved customer service. As the number of clients Business Connexion supports increases, so does the pressure to maintain solid customer relationships. The company often takes calculated risks to invest in new technology solutions, but the company never gambles on the metric that matters most: customer satisfaction.