Yellowfin

Auto IT, a leading B2B dealer management software system (DMS) company in the Australasian region, faced a significant challenge with its clients' reporting processes. Prior to adopting Yellowfin, Auto IT’s clients relied heavily on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for reporting, a largely manual and inefficient workflow that was not mobile-friendly and lacked modern analytics features such as visualization. As an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner, Auto IT needed an analytics solution that could support its customers' growing analytical requirements. The inefficiencies and limitations of the existing reporting system were the primary drivers behind Auto IT's decision to seek a Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics solution.

Digital Planet, a B2B2C enterprise, was facing challenges with its data warehouse performance due to its gradual expansion over the years. The company wanted to provide a better data analytics experience for its customers, with full self-service reporting capabilities. However, the performance degradation of its data warehouse limited its ability to offer additional data-related services to its customers during office hours. Data refresh was done every hour and updates could take as long as 20 minutes, slowing down the reporting environment for customers. As Digital Planet was looking to enhance its technology offering with both self-service reporting and embedded analytical reporting for its customers, it identified the clear need to optimize its current environment first. This required implementing the right analytics and business intelligence solutions in place that could fulfil all its various data-related objectives.

Traditionally, insurers have been starved when it comes to underwriting data. They rely heavily on risk and pricing actuaries to underwrite their Protection products. And in the case of reinsurance firms, they need to provide additional data insights to insurers as part of their reinsurance process. Previously, underwriters might gain access to updated underwriting data on a monthly basis, and this data is crucial to understand how their rules have performed. So being able to analyse and make changes to their pricing rules, and deploy those changes into production, used to take months. Lead Consultant, Rikus van der Merwe of UnderwriteMe, explains, “We turn that feedback loop around in minutes, so underwriters can make changes to the rules engine and deploy those changes once they are tested and are completely happy with them. They can get Management Information (MI) feedback in fifteen minutes, which is previously unheard of.” For intermediaries, UnderwriteMe, wanted to break down the traditional, fractured sales process by delivering real-time underwriting. This means that when customers are comparing prices and products, they know that the premiums they are seeing are accurate, personalised, and fully underwritten by insurers.

Several years ago, Rivalea decided to implement a company-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. While the chosen solution delivered reporting functionality, General Manager for Sales and Marketing, Mark McKenzie, found the group needed a better and faster understanding of business performance. He wanted to see business analytics as well as reporting, so the company decided to investigate business intelligence (BI) platforms. After reviewing a few options, Rivalea opted to go with the Yellowfin Cloud BI solution, supplied and supported by local Yellowfin business partner, Toustone. “We knew we didn’t have the inhouse resource within the group,” said McKenzie, “so we needed some guidance and we felt we couldn’t go wrong with Toustone. It helps that they are local, as we know we can rely on their ongoing support”.

Economically testing times and an ultra-competitive global marketplace, combined with the need to adhere to growingly rigorous regulations, mean that organizations within all sections of the finance industry are under increasing pressure to make better, faster decisions. Financial institutions across the globe – from major banks to insurers – rely on Yellowfin’s Business Intelligence (BI) solution to increase employee productivity, improve operational efficiencies and drive customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction.

To deliver its services to the Wirral population, the Trust relies on both the expertise of its staff but also on information technology systems that help it manage a wide range of activities including direct patient care, facilities management and staffing schedules. In common with much of the NHS, Wirral is continually looking at ways to raise efficiency and improve patient outcomes while saving public money. To this end, the Trust’s Finance Team invested in a new costing system, and initially began to look at ways to improve financial reporting to streamline processes and deliver a better service. Berry and his team tested several BI products before selecting Yellowfin. He says: “When we evaluated Yellowfin, it was clear that it could be used for finance, but we knew it would also work across the entire Trust.” Berry says that Yellowfin was less expensive than competitive solutions yet offered better support and a more flexible licensing policy, which allowed the Trust to deploy it to more users than was otherwise possible with their legacy BI tool. Alongside comprehensive reporting and dashboarding capabilities, Berry felt the geographic information system (GIS) mapping in Yellowfin made it really stand out. He comments: “As a community trust, we work across multiple sites. We aren’t just one hospital with our services centered in one place. We felt it would be really useful if we could visualise where the Trust was delivering its care. I think ease of use was another huge factor” says Berry. “In terms of training requirements, Yellowfin was substantially easier to use, and quicker to pick up than other competitor solutions.”

RFi Group faced significant challenges with their existing data delivery system. The process of cleansing research data monthly and using an in-house solution to deliver static reports via email was becoming increasingly resource-intensive, slow, and inefficient. Clients found it difficult to search through emails to retrieve static file-based reports, making it hard to find desired information quickly or explore data to uncover new insights. RFi Group needed a more efficient, interactive, and immediate way to deliver insights to their clients. They sought a Business Intelligence (BI) platform that could provide a single source of truth, allowing clients to access live reports securely and interactively.

In a highly competitive market, BGL Life needed to analyze product performance and make agile changes to their customer journeys to improve performance. They set up their own SQL enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to pull information from various systems and wrote their own quote and pricing rules. However, the daily extraction of data was insufficient for the business to be responsive. It took two hours a day to extract and format data for Management Information (MI), which was not efficient. The team needed a new BI and analytics tool to address these challenges.

The telecommunication industry is a highly competitive and constantly shifting business landscape – an environment continuously affected by the unremitting emergence of new technologies and competitors, changing economic conditions and government regulation, privatization, mergers and acquisitions, a proliferation of global cellular phone service subscribers, as well as shifting consumer sentiments and demands. Telecommunications organizations now deliver both households and businesses more traditional products and services – such as landline, cellular and Internet packages – in conjunction with emergent offerings such as Internet TV, VOIP and Wi-Fi. And, new fibre-optic cabling initiatives and 4G networks are producing ultra-high-speed Internet and new possibilities for online services and entertainment –at home, at work and on-the-go. With new and bundled products and services, disruptive technologies and business environments, in conjunction with the trend towards super-competitive pricing, telecommunications organizations and service providers are in need of cost-effective and highly scalable BI to control and analyze spending and investment.

The IT department of Westfälische Provinzial aimed to improve IT reporting by consolidating five different reporting solutions into a single web-based tool. They needed a powerful yet simple reporting tool for their 450 employees. The primary challenge was to map out key technical requirements and operational processes for the new solution. The existing solution, BMC’s IT service management tools, restricted access to only one data source, which was a limitation. The IT team also considered other embedded analytics software but found Yellowfin to be the most suitable due to its ability to access multiple data sources and its strong local presence in Germany.

St. LukesHealth, a Tasmanian not-for-profit health insurer, faced inefficiencies in their payroll group processing. The manual reconciliation of member payroll deductions with employer remittance advices was time-consuming and required the attention of their most experienced staff. The process involved comparing employer-provided PDF files with data in the HAMBS insurance operating software system, which was tedious and prone to errors. With 25 payroll groups to manage, the task was ripe for automation to free up staff for more productive work.

At the privately-owned residences in Holbæk, it is important that the staff, services, and buildings continually adapt to the number of residents and their changing needs. Over time, Granhøjen has expanded from 40 to 120 employees, and as a result getting a complete overview of the company’s key figures has become a heavy administrative task. “The figures we used to give the board were a month old and out of date by the time we presented them,” says Mads Olsen, Chief Operating Officer at Granhøjen, “I felt frustrated that we lacked quick and easy access to information and weren’t able to make management decisions based on up-to-date data. It used to take around 25-30 hours a quarter to collect data via Excel for each board report.” Granhøjen also lacked insight into their residents and the services they required. There was no process in place to understand why residents had been discharged. It was unclear if residents had left because they had gotten better, or whether there was something about Granhøjen’s services they were unhappy with. This knowledge was retained by staff who spoke directly with the municipalities in charge of the residential contracts, but none of this knowledge was captured and used systematically for management information or process improvement.

Honda France’s Power Equipment division wanted to achieve three main analytics goals relating to its sales force: consolidate access to sales and customer data via a single trustworthy platform, simplify access to a user-friendly BI tool for better real-time decision-making, and streamline IT department operations for efficient deployment and management of the BI solution. Honda France IT Manager, Regis Loumont, sought an easy-to-use and manage reporting and analytics solution to replace an existing resource-intensive and expensive BI tool. Initial trials with several open-source solutions revealed connectivity issues and a lack of robustness required by Honda France.

Extracting intellectual property from management in a comprehensive, fast-paced business environment was a challenge for Ruralco. Additionally, the presence of multiple data streams from incongruent systems made it impossible to identify a single source of truth with respect to overall business performance. The company saw two key areas as obstacles to fostering potential growth; a lack of in-house expertise in business intelligence and analytics, coupled with the absence of a structured and timely reporting program. While there was no deficit of available data from various streams, Ruralco lacked the facility to access accurate business-wide information in real-time. The company recognised that harnessing existing data and presenting it in visual format would not only deliver a detailed snapshot of current performance, but also cultivate an ethos of better and more timely decision-making across the business.

Because 97 percent of Lancashire Care’s business is related to the provision of community-based care, its clinicians are frequently away from their desks – continually on-the-go visiting clients. Previously, the Trust’s community services staff worked remotely through a paper-based diary system of record keeping, requiring them to travel back to a dedicated base to re-enter the information through a desktop PC. Consequently, Lancashire Care embarked on a program to transition the majority of its services workforce onto tablet devices, allowing them to directly create, share and consume information through its online networks remotely. This required a flexible Business Intelligence (BI) solution, which large numbers of non-technical staff could easily utilise – primarily through mobile devices – to independently access and share important client and Trust data. Lancashire Care formerly used Microsoft Reporting Services 2008 R2, in conjunction with Performance Point 2010, as its front-end data visualisation layer for desktop-based reporting. However, Lancashire Care found these tools to be incompatible with mobile devices, and therefore unacceptable for the remote delivery and consumption of data.

Libraries and educational facilities generate vast amounts of data that need to be easily analyzed and translated into meaningful insights. Civica recognized the demand for an easy-to-use BI tool that enables library managers and council staff to ask better questions of collected information, facilitating system and policy improvements. Civica’s established Library Management System, Spydus, provided a set of reporting tools for many years. However, increasing reporting obligations highlighted the need for additional functionality and flexibility to meet the needs of today’s multi-faceted library and educational environments.

By 2012, Prometheus had established itself as a major provider of analytic tools to Australia's health funds. However, the company recognized that the information needs of health funds were evolving, and it was time to enhance its offerings. The competitive landscape was shifting, with data utilization for decision support becoming a critical differentiator. Prometheus needed to adapt to these changes to maintain its market position. The company had a solid user base with its WIZ OLAP engine, which was already integrated into several health funds and industry-managed applications. Despite this success, Prometheus realized that the growing demand for data visualization and advanced reporting capabilities required a new approach. The challenge was to find a solution that could complement their existing OLAP engine without diverting their focus from their core expertise in data analysis and health fund operations.

Gateshead NHS is recognized as a digitally mature Trust and has been linked to Newcastle University Hospital as a fast follower, as part of the Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) programme, to further accelerate their digital transformation. David Thompson, the Information and Development Manager, identified significant bottlenecks from an analytical and operational perspective. Cognos and QlikView were not being used to their full potential, with QlikView used exclusively for financial information and Cognos being difficult to use. David aimed to decentralize report building and find an easier tool for the wider business to create and consume content without extensive training. The Trust also had to manage nationally mandated performance and KPI metrics, with a significant amount of time spent preparing information and supporting route cause analysis.

Summit Innovations faced the challenge of optimizing drive-through operations for quick service restaurants (QSRs). The primary issues were monitoring vehicle activity, reducing waiting times, and improving speed of service. The existing system needed to provide real-time data and alerts to help management and staff identify and respond to bottlenecks. Additionally, there was a need for a more sophisticated data analysis and reporting system to compare efficiency across different properties and improve overall operational performance.