eUKhost, a leading web hosting solutions provider, was facing a challenge of managing a large and continually growing client base. The volume of incoming calls and emails was increasing steadily, with the website averaging over 85,000 unique visitors each month. This led to a need for improving customer satisfaction by speeding up response times. Additionally, there was an opportunity to improve conversion rates by guiding visitors along the ordering process.

IPSL, one of the UK’s largest suppliers of PVC wall and ceiling cladding panels, relies on internet sales for 75% of their revenue and as the primary source of first-time clients. The company makes a significant investment in Google AdWords campaigns, running approximately ten to twelve campaigns, covering over 16,000 keywords in total. However, they experienced a leveling-off of their results—additional budget commitment was not yielding a proportionate increase in conversions. This served to sharpen their focus on how they could increase the ROI of their already-substantial investment in pay-per-click campaigns.

Mantra Group, a leading accommodation provider in Australia and New Zealand, was facing a significant challenge in managing high volumes of incoming traffic to its website. With the majority of hotel reservations and bookings now occurring online in Australia, Mantra had devoted a significant proportion of marketing spend to driving traffic to its site, including regular email activity to a database of over one million subscribers. However, supporting such a vast quantity of people was proving a significant challenge and conversion rates were low. Mantra Group recognised a major opportunity to improve the way it engaged with website visitors in order to provide a more optimal online experience and encourage them to convert.

EE, a UK-based digital communications company, was looking to establish its brand and enhance its customer service across all channels. The company registers around 86 million customer conversations via online and offline channels annually. EE saw Live Chat as an important new way to establish high levels of customer satisfaction in relation to transactional queries and general enquiries on the site. The challenge was to fully establish the brand in the minds of consumers, which only arrived on the scene in October 2012 with the launch of 4G. In addition to branding, EE wanted to be considered best in service across all channels.

Sun Life Direct, a well-known brand in the UK life assurance sector, was facing a challenge with its digital marketing strategy. The company's customers traditionally applied via telephone or paper from traditional direct marketing advertising. However, with the increasing amount of time consumers now spend online, particularly when it comes to researching and purchasing products, Sun Life Direct realized that it needed to offer an online service to its customers, comparable to its offline one, and maintaining high customer service standards was key to this. The company also wanted to set up a digital platform that would facilitate the marketing of new products to customers with a different demographic profile. Its existing target customers are typically late-adopters of digital technology and sometimes need help in making the switch to online applications. For reasons of cost, expertise and efficiency, online customer service would need to be handled by Sun Life Direct’s existing customer telephone enquiry service, operated by 2Touch, based in Sunderland.

Sunweb Holidays, a popular travel holiday company, was facing challenges in the increasingly competitive online travel industry. The cost of targeting customers had risen significantly, with 50% of the company's marketing budget being spent on Google Ad Words alone, which was not driving the required return on investment. The company also suffered from limited IT agility, with a small local team only able to control the site content via a Content Management System that offered limited personalisation and reporting capabilities. Sunweb Holidays wanted to capitalise on the growing number of visitors to its website and convert them into sales, rather than just focusing on driving traffic to the website.

Trustmark, a leading provider of employee benefits services, was facing a challenge with its Voluntary Benefit Solutions (VBS) subsidiary. The company lacked formalized metrics and indicators needed to support a five-year strategic transformation and revenue growth initiative. Existing reports took weeks to complete and delivered limited insight. As a result, business users often relied on Excel spreadsheets, which contained incomplete or outdated information. The company needed a centralized business intelligence (BI) and analytics capability to consolidate data from multiple diverse systems and make it readily accessible to executives, process owners, and operational workers so they can closely monitor VBS operations and activities.

The Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) in Mexico was tasked with managing the country's environmental and natural resource policy. However, the agency faced challenges in integrating, processing, analyzing, and distributing environmental information from its network of offices to meet the demands of internal and external users. Most of SEMARNAT's environmental analytics efforts were performed manually, using print publications to disseminate figures, images, and maps with relevant environmental information. This process was cumbersome and inefficient, leading SEMARNAT to realize the need for a solid business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform.

Shikoku Electric Power Co., Inc., a leading multi-utility company in Japan, was facing challenges with the speed and efficiency of spreadsheet output, a crucial element of the company’s day-to-day business operations. In 2004, when Shikoku adopted SAP R/3 as a new management system for the entire group, the company also introduced a reporting tool for creating spreadsheets. Three years later, Shikoku decided to upgrade its SAP R/3 enterprise reporting (ERP) system, and began searching for a new, compatible spreadsheet creation tool.

Sligro Food Group, a leading food and beverage retailer in the Dutch market, was struggling to leverage the vast amount of data it collected from its homegrown ERP system. The company's reporting strategy was fragmented, with over 700 Brio reports providing inconsistent and disjointed information. The company was operating largely on gut feeling, unable to extract valuable insights from the data at its fingertips. Sligro needed a tool to streamline and enhance its reporting strategy, providing improved insight into store sales and other aspects of the company’s operations, including finance, logistics, and marketing.

Siemens Energy, a leading supplier of energy technology, was facing a challenge in managing the construction of combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants. The data required for project management in the planning and construction phases of such complex projects was dispersed over several IT systems and manually generated reports. This made it difficult to recognize changes ahead of time. Siemens Energy needed a solution that could quickly retrieve data from various sources, monitor it, and make it available to project managers in a form they could quickly assess and use as a basis for decisions.

ASM Research, a leading provider of application, software, system, network, database, and reporting solutions to U.S. government customers, was faced with the challenge of modernizing an outdated reporting environment. This environment was used by military training personnel to track the training activities of U.S. Army individuals within the training and developing programs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and other federal agencies. The old system was antiquated, difficult to use, and posed numerous challenges when it came to tracking training-related events and monitoring how resources were being allocated and funds were being spent. There was an urgent need to update and modernize the environment, without disrupting training services.

U.S. Bank, the sixth largest commercial bank in the United States, needed to deploy a comprehensive Business Intelligence (BI) environment that could serve the reporting needs of dozens of divisions, hundreds of developers, and hundreds of thousands of users. The bank required a solution that could streamline access to corporate data, establish a BI competency center to train users, and make BI software readily available to both users and developers. The bank also needed a secure and pervasive reporting environment that could be integrated into the core activities and business processes at the bank, positively impacting both employees and customers.

United Way, the world’s largest privately funded nonprofit organization, needed to help its worldwide network of 13,000 employees understand which partners have the best performance, which programs are the most successful. The organization was only able to view resulting data from their studies via tabular reports and high-level summaries. As more sophisticated analytics tools became available, United Way realized that the entire staff would be more likely to recognize patterns, dependencies, and anomalies in the data if it were presented visually through dashboards, maps, and charts. United Way carefully evaluated several market-leading analytics tools before purchasing the WebFOCUS platform from Information Builders.

The Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM) is a private higher education institution with a full range of degrees and expert courses in a variety of disciplines. The university was facing a challenge to efficiently extract and analyze institutional data so administrators can implement corrective measures and control key management variables. The faculty and staff required access to current financial and operational information to keep administrative costs down, align academic initiatives with strategic objectives, and streamline many facets of the operation. For an educational institution, the ability to quickly and effectively analyze student, administrative, and financial data can translate into significant improvements in enrollment numbers, student performance, and fiscal efficiency. With these goals in mind, UEM set in motion an Information Systems Master Plan that uses Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform to create analytic applications for key decision-makers throughout the campus.

Vermeer Corporation, a leading manufacturer of industrial and agricultural equipment, was facing challenges with its data management. The company was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and standard reports from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to track business metrics. However, as Vermeer’s operation continued to grow globally, managing, monitoring, and exchanging an escalating volume of data became progressively more difficult. Critical information was stored in disconnected data silos or housed in “spreadmarts,” which led to conflicting totals in reports and IT management headaches. Company leaders sought a way to deliver useful business intelligence into the hands of people throughout the organization to support their culture of continuous improvement.

Visteon Corporation, a leading global automotive supplier, was facing the challenge of streamlining the retrieval of critical data from a variety of ERP systems, legacy environments, and disparate databases for business users. The company was using four different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in North America, each creating distinct types of data. Users previously had to log in to each system, gather the data they required, and then manually combine it to generate reports. This process was time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, the company wanted to create new types of financial reports for employees and supply chain partners.

Walsworth Publishing, a publisher of yearbooks and other print materials, was facing a challenge in providing its clients with quick and easy access to information. The company was undergoing a massive technology overhaul that included deploying a new ERP system called Prism Win, a vertical application suite for the printing industry. This overhaul impacted Walsworth’s customer-facing applications as well as its internal reporting systems. The company needed a single business intelligence (BI) platform that could combine fragmented data created by different programmers using different databases and data management tools. The former reporting capabilities weren’t scalable, they weren’t flexible, and they couldn’t keep up with the company's growth.

WESCO International Distribution, a large, geographically dispersed company with 350 warehouses, 6,000 employees, 200,000 products, and more than 130,000 business customers worldwide, faced the challenge of centralizing decision-making and rolling up information in a timely manner. The company's aging information systems were due for an upgrade as they were not user-friendly and required assistance from professional analysts to execute many of the reports. Furthermore, the complex reporting infrastructure required database administrators to follow a tedious process to prepare the data for reporting, which took a significant amount of time. The company needed a Web-based solution that could automatically roll up and distribute reports to users in any format.

Western Power Distribution (WPD) is the electricity distribution network operator for South West England and South and West Wales. The network consists of 83,000 kms of overhead lines and underground cables, and 90,000 substations. The company has approximately 2,300 staff. Over the years, the company had established a number of different enterprise applications and systems. However, WPD wanted a business intelligence platform that would allow the company to have a single view of the business, based on multiple data sources, and have the flexibility to offer standardised and bespoke reports respectively. One of the major challenges that WPD wanted to overcome by moving to a new BI platform was the ability to access multiple data sources via a single tool. With key data residing in a variety of systems ranging from a mainframe, Oracle 10g database and other enterprise software applications, WPD did not want to continue providing a reporting tool for each application but rather access all the data and present it using a single BI solution.

Willis Towers Watson, a global multinational risk management, insurance brokerage, and advisory company, was facing challenges in modernizing the customer experience, simplifying security, and streamlining access to sensitive client information. The company wanted to create a customer-facing analytics portal that serves multiple lines of business, anchored by a HIPAA-compliant security layer that allows single-sign-on access to essential business functions. The initial version of their BenefitView application did not keep pace with the growing needs of the company. It was not scalable for high-volume transactions and required significant maintenance. The company needed to upgrade to a scalable solution with a robust architecture that would continue to manage their business-critical requirements, including absolute security for HIPAA data.

Wings Travel Management, a company specializing in oil and gas-related travel, faced the challenge of capturing travel data for clients operating across Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East and putting it in a form that they can use to monitor their travel programs. The company wanted to create customer-facing analytics portals along with a secure metadata layer that enables clients to visualize just their subset of the travel data via interactive charts, graphs, and maps. However, their previous analytical inquiries couldn’t prevent users from changing formulas that the IT team created, which meant similar inquiries sometimes yielded conflicting results. Managing the underlying data was also tedious as they had to manually control hundreds of individual queries and reports.

Worldpay, a payment processing and technology provider, needed new reports, dashboards, and analytics capabilities to leverage its expanding big-data lake and related resources. The company discovered that many of its customers want to analyze their transaction level payment data and it has marshaled substantial resources to facilitate these requests. From the world’s largest retailers to small mom-and-pop merchants, Worldpay is leading a transformation in the payments industry. The company has nearly 800,000 merchants and processed 23 billion transactions last year. To improve its pricing capabilities, Worldpay’s Data and Analysis Insights team use WebFOCUS to visualize and populate domain-specific objects from a Hadoop data lake. Their big-data environment, which utilizes a distributed storage architecture, has lowered the cost of managing transaction data from more than $6,000 per terabyte to about $500 per terabyte.

York Regional Police (YRP) had been amassing valuable data for years from various systems including a dispatch system, a records management system, a PeopleSoft ERP system, and various other sources, including Microsoft Excel. However, to support data-driven decision-making, data had to be manually aggregated and deconflicted to answer questions about how, when, where, and why police assets were deployed. YRP wanted an easy way to query this data to gain real-time insights into officer activity and performance; how an officer’s work time is compartmentalized across a variety of official daily duties; where they stand with sick time, personal leave, vacation, and overtime; and early flagging of traumatic incidents that can threaten an officer’s mental and physical well-being.

Dahl Finland Ltd., a leading wholesale supplier of HVAC, public utility, and pipe products in the Nordic and Baltic regions, was facing a challenge with its existing enterprise resource planning system (ERP). The ERP system had rudimentary reporting capabilities and was not user-friendly. This led to workers throughout the enterprise struggling to access, analyze, and view accurate and consistent business data. The company also used Microsoft Excel to generate additional custom reports outside of the IT department. These manual methods of reporting were time-consuming and generated inconsistent data. The company needed a solution that could modernize and rationalize their analytics system to deliver more comprehensive and accurate information.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) had been collecting data on criminal activity for many years. However, it relied upon a manual process of sifting through 13 disparate data sources to analyze crime statistics, identify trends, and model resource allocations. This made it difficult to make sense of all the information. Users typically had to run multiple queries to be able to drill into the data and answer specific questions. CMPD command staff recognized the need for improvement and sought funding through an Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Homeland Security Grant. The goal was not only to enable command staff and dispatchers to easily run reports, but also to push information out to officers in real time.

As Colorado State University's analytics endeavors expanded to include many types of data and reporting tools, the institution’s faculty and staff members had a difficult time obtaining consistent data. People were showing up at meetings with conflicting numbers due to inconsistent operational definitions and the lack of a central reporting platform. The university needed one centrally supported platform that could deliver one version of the truth. Campus constituents wanted a cloud-based solution that could improve student outcomes through predictive analytics, boost operational efficiencies, and differentiate CSU from other institutions with externally facing dashboards and fact books.

The Council of Europe, an organization that represents Greater Europe and manages a total budget of over 260 million euros annually, was facing challenges with its IT infrastructure. The Council was generating and managing a lot of information that could not be rationalized quickly enough to be used to aid business decisions effectively. The Council decided to look more closely at its IT infrastructure as well as the way in which it is managed and used by employees with a view to rationalizing and improving it. A large scale upgrade of its financial information system ensued. An RFI was launched at this time to find a BI vendor that provided an end to end solution that was easy to use on all levels of the organization and was able to be implemented within the tight deadlines imposed by the wider financial information system’s upgrade that was underway at the time.

Firma Foreign Exchange, a global firm providing international payment currency solutions, was facing challenges in streamlining the creation of secure, dynamic analytics based on current account data. The company wanted to extend data management and visualization capabilities to traders, managers, and executives. Additionally, Firma wanted to deliver customer-facing analytics to account holders to provide transactional transparency. The company's business community was generating SQL reports and creating Excel spreadsheets to examine operational data. Plus, they manually created thousands of monthly statements and e-mailed them to their customers. Firma wanted to find easier ways to access, analyze, and distribute this business information.

The County of Los Angeles, one of the largest regional governments in North America, faced a significant challenge in managing the compensation and benefits for its approximately 100,000 employees. The county’s previous reporting tools required nightly data dumps and custom coding, which limited analysts’ ability to respond quickly to requests for information. This was particularly problematic when dealing with labor negotiations with state and national labor unions, which represent approximately 80 percent of the county’s workforce. The county needed a more efficient and effective way to extract, analyze, and visualize the immense amount of data involved in managing employee compensation and benefits.