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Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG (BIFAB) had a wealth of information stored in various formats, including card indexes, contracts, historical publishing bibliographies, and readers’ queries. However, this information was not easily accessible to all staff members, and searching for specific information was time-consuming and inefficient. The company’s contracts were kept in the management office, and searching for a contract involved at least two members of staff. Searching for information in the historical publishing bibliographies was also extremely time-consuming, as it involved carefully removing the very old and sometimes very delicate volumes from their shelves. The large number of readers’ queries, which were filed with the answering letters, was getting out of control. The company needed a solution that would make all necessary information available in a secure, simple, fast, and transparent manner.

The Tippecanoe County Clerk’s Office in Indiana, USA, was tasked with maintaining and storing a vast archive of legal, historical, and ownership records. The challenge was not only to store the information but also to provide timely access to it for internal and public use. The county had numerous storage facilities, and most of the records dated before 1990 were stored on microfilm. The process of retrieving a document was time-consuming and could take up to three days. The County Clerk discovered that money was available in the records budget to modernize the storage of records. A plan was developed to gradually transfer the county’s records into DocuWare.

ZF Friedrichshafen AG, a leading supplier of mechatronic solutions for the automobile industry, had over a million corporate and technical documents in their electronic archives by 2004. The company needed a new system that could carry over the legacy documents at low cost, demonstrate a flexible and customizable software structure, and promise to be a safe long-term investment. The requirements for electronic document administration had drastically risen over the years. Features for process management and optimization, such as the ability to generate workflows, were nonnegotiable. They also were looking for a certified SAP interface. In the interests of preventing their applications from growing out of control, for years they have held to the strategy of consistently standardizing all their business processes to fit into their SAP environment.

BEGO, a dental company based in Bremen, Germany, was facing challenges with its document management. The company had to meet strict requirements for production, research, and development, as well as administration and information management. Businesses in the dental sector must satisfy extensive obligations for documentation. BEGO was spending large amounts of time searching for documents and related day-to-day paperwork, especially when customers had follow-up questions. Filing the various documents was quite labor-intensive. They were running out of space for document storage. Inquiries, invoices, delivery notes, and offers were all kept in traditional paper files, and the filing cabinets were overflowing. They were eager to save on the labor and expense that it took to maintain their unwieldy files.

The Biggest Loser Resorts, a well-known fitness and wellness resort, wanted to streamline its accounting processes across its three locations in Utah, California, and New York. The resort was looking to reduce document processing time, streamline invoice approval for internal and remote employees, and strengthen document retention compliance. The resort also wanted to adopt environmentally healthy business practices. The challenge was to find a solution that could address these needs while also providing secure archiving.

The Newark Group, an international paper and cardboard recycling company, was facing inefficiencies in its administrative business processes due to the high volume of paper documents. Particularly in accounting, order processing, and production, tons of documents had accumulated over time. One employee was singularly dedicated to managing the central paper archive. Searching for certain documents was increasingly time-consuming, and the physical exchange of documents between two locations often led to documents being lost or untraceable, often because of misfiling. The company sought to eliminate these issues and lay the foundation for savvy digital workflows by introducing an electronic document management system.

The decision to use a DMS came in early 2009 after dhmp was created by the merger of two previously independent consultancy firms. Some company employees already had experience of working with an electronic filing system, but others were used to working with a paper filing system. This required an enormous amount of space: Around ten million sheets of paper had to be stored and archived in a tamper-proof format each year. In some branches, this meant that older documents which were only needed on a very sporadic basis had to be moved to alternative storage for financial reasons. During the merger, they wanted to streamline processes throughout the company. They decided to stick with the Addison platform and to switch to the DocuWare document management system.

H&J Martin, a leading European provider of Facilities Management services, was facing challenges with their paper-based approach to business and administrative processes. The company was generating around 12000 engineer service reports, 3000 suppliers sales invoices, and numerous amounts of paper on a monthly basis. The long search and processing times for paper-based systems were affecting the ability of employees to source the information they needed. In 2010, the team at H&J Martin Facilities Management decided it was time to replace their paper-based approach with an integrated document management system. The company sought to significantly reduce the high number of paper copies and enjoy savings in future archiving space. They also needed a system that could integrate with their existing software environments and could be expanded later.

T-Formation, a large volume printer in the United States, was facing challenges with its in-house order system solution which provided limited reporting functionality. The system handled all sales, general ledger, artwork management, production schedule, statistics, shipping, receiving, and invoicing, but linking this data in a way to identify opportunities was not easy. The traditional form of reporting did not allow decision makers to get to information easily. The organization knew there were areas they were unable to successfully analyze and wanted to implement a tool that would allow business to see – at a glance – whether they were making a profit and how they could manage their contracts more efficiently.

Over the course of a decade, NCN accumulated over 1.5 million rows of data for internal reporting on a relational database, and used a relational database management system (RDBMS) to access their data. In order to create internal reports from the database, the Business Intelligence (BI) Manager had to spend approximately three to four hours daily researching, writing, and executing SQL queries. After extracting the appropriate data, the BI Manager was then tasked with several more hours of analysis and ultimately placing the data into a suitable format for presentation and distribution. Another challenge NCN faced was providing business users access to their data in a timely fashion. In order to create reports, employees first submitted IT tickets wherein a series of very specific instructions were provided and subsequently executed by a member of the IT staff. However, because new questions would often arise after the report had been delivered, employees would then have to resubmit an IT ticket requesting a revision of the original report. This delayed the efficacy of decision makers and created a backlog in the IT department.

AmberPoint provides solutions for governing and managing composite applications for enterprises, government agencies, and leading software companies. These clients run high-transaction systems, many of which are mission-critical and high-value. They rely on AmberPoint for reliable, comprehensive solutions for runtime governance of their composite applications. However, AmberPoint faced a decision about the data presentation layer of its service level agreement management function. The requirements called for Web-based information access for ad hoc reporting needs and formatted PDF report distribution for standardized uptime reports. If an OEM solution were to be selected, it needed to offer the flexibility of control that an internally developed one would have offered. AmberPoint sought to avoid limitations in an API that would impede the ongoing development of new core application features and their related information reporting needs. Lastly, the technology needed to be easy enough to implement and deploy that attendant costly consulting services could be avoided.

FPX's clients are in industries such as manufacturing, high-tech, and medical devices where products have myriad configurations, strict specification matching requirements, or regulatory demands. The users are sales departments who benefit from the time saved, greater order accuracy, and higher sales throughput gained from an automated workflow process for the configuration or selection of order components, the calculation of pricing based on complex volume discounts or bundles, and the generation of professionally crafted, branded quote documents. FPX did not want to perpetually expend resources on developing and maintaining reporting and publishing technologies when its core competency is developing an application that maximizes workflow efficiency and optimizes the user experience. As a provider of a SaaS application that is Java-based, FPX sought a Java-based publishing solution that could be easily integrated with its own. FPX required a very dependable, high-throughput publishing engine that had direct data access and modeling capabilities plus a strong design tool to generate ad hoc and templated documents in PDF and Excel formats.

The Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSFMC) was faced with the challenge of monitoring fish migrations through the Federal Columbia River Power System to provide valuable research information for the restoration of declining salmon and steelhead populations. The monitoring process involved recording large volumes of data which were automatically uploaded to the PTAGIS database every three hours. The challenge was how PSMFC reports were to be accessed, delivered and used across their disparate user base. Users access PTAGIS from remote locations and a wide variety of platforms including Windows PC, Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, Linux and others. The PSMFC needed a flexible, extensible, and easy-to-use solution.

eScholar provides solutions for collecting, cleansing, identifying, analyzing and reporting on the data that educators need for tracking and improving the performance of the complex enterprise of educating children. All of the data elements in eScholar systems are maintained at the finest, or lowest, level of detail and can be stored for an unlimited period of longitudinal history within any of the categories or domains of data. eScholar must integrate all of these data regardless of source. Therefore every fact collected by a school district that relates to an individual student’s performance remains tied to that individual. eScholar had several mandatory requirements for their reporting solution. First and foremost, it needed to offer an easy-to-use self-service environment that enabled their users who had a wide variety to technical skill levels, to access and report on their information. Secondly, it needed to be a low maintenance solution that integrated seamlessly with a wide variety of IT infrastructures and didn’t impact school districts with application downloads, plug-ins, or upgrades. It needed flexible, easily administered security, and had to be as affordable for schools with a couple of users, as well as districts with tens of thousands of users in widely distributed information system environments. eScholar selected InetSoft after evaluating many vendor solutions, as well as the open source products available today.

ArcSight’s award-winning ESM software acts as a command center for customers to discover and manage risks, correlate relevant event, operational and trend information, assess vulnerabilities and communicate compliance. The system collects and distills millions of enterprise-wide events down to the most critical information necessary for organizations to make informed decisions to protect their business and network assets. ArcSight required a flexible, low-maintenance, high-performance reporting tool that could be embedded into its software and easily integrate with many disparate data sources. It needed to report on thousands of devices, throughout widely distributed deployments, multiple firewalls and a wide assortment of third party vendor products. It also needed to be easy enough for customers of different technological skill levels to use, and still provide sophisticated graphical reports.

Data Solutions Inc. (DSI) needed a new reporting solution to replace their legacy system. Their robust data collection process and sophisticated scoring capabilities could not meet customer requirements without a reporting solution that was fully integrated. The solution needed to allow them to configure the components of their application suite for their customers as required, while considerably reducing report development and production cycles. The major challenge for Data Solutions was to integrate their application suite with a flexible J2EE based reporting tool that would allow them deliver custom real-time reports and surveys with the unique and distinctive layout and design for each customer’s specific requirements. Prior to implementing InetSoft’s Style Report™ software, Data Solutions relied on a proprietary legacy application that required all of the data be extracted from their core systems for reporting. This process added significant cycles to their development process and limited the turn around time for setting up and generating reports.

Pentagon Technologies needed to improve many operational aspects of its sales process that reporting and information management were a key part of. Prior to implementing the Style Report™ application of InetSoft’s Style Intelligence™ platform, simple databases had been created and were individually and manually accessed. Daily reports consisted of a spreadsheet that was converted to html for Web distribution. This labor-intensive process typically took 1-2 hours per day and when their analyst was out of the office, updates had to wait. Reporting errors were also a problem.

Dairy.com provides a vital nationwide service for the dairy industry, transacting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dairy products each year. Major companies such as Dannon; Dean Foods; Dreyer's Ice Cream; Kraft Foods; Land O' Lakes; Leprino Foods; and Schreiber Foods rely on Dairy.com’s supply chain solutions that includes scheduling, spot trading, contracting, and transportation -- as well as comprehensive transaction and trading facilitation services, for a broad variety of dairy commodities. Providing secure, customized access to this highly dynamic data is critical to the operations and profitability of their customers. Prior to implementing InetSoft’s Style Report™ software, Dairy.com used a primarily manual process to report on this wide variety of data. Data access was cumbersome and typically resided on a variety of legacy systems. In many cases, customers received the raw data in static files and had to analyze the information themselves. The process was slow and labor intensive.

Before adopting InetSoft’s Style Scope, information delivery at Brenk Brothers mainly consisted of reports that were produced for monthly meetings with executive management. These relatively simple reports were produced by hand-running SQL queries, then exporting the data into Excel for manual modifications and chart building, then converting them into PowerPoint presentations for better display. The problem with this tedious process was that if something was not quite right with the report, or if a new informational need arose, they had to go all the way back to the drawing board, writing new SQL queries and restarting the process. This would sometimes have to be repeated several times for a single report. This stimulated a search for a BI tool that would make analysis and information delivery easier, for both the end user and the IT department. While Brenk Brothers did not want a tool that required large amounts of IT time for modifications, they also did not want to have to rely on a BI vendor to make modifications for them.

AgKnowledge is a cloud-based SaaS solution for medium and small fresh fruit and vegetable producers and distributors. The user portal utilizes InetSoft's Style Intelligence to deliver dashboards and reports, and to provide data models which save time, as they can be reused for different clients. Data is supplied to the solution using various mobile apps, which gather both manually entered data and data collected automatically by sensors on the agricultural and shipping equipment. All client data is stored in an AS/400 multitenant database. The developers at DiD have found InetSoft’s system of logical and physical data models to be a boost of efficiency when creating dashboards for different clients. A cross-platform for all their clients linked to common data models enables the same data models to be reused and modified for various clients, each with their own specific needs.

DiamondStream, a company that provides analytical insights to casinos, wanted to create an online application that would provide casinos with unmatched insight into the marketplace and patron behavior. The company needed a partner that could contribute the analytical expertise and technology on which this new application would be based. The partnership would provide the means for DiamondStream to build a data warehouse that could hold and de-duplicate GCA data and provide an intuitive user interface with online dashboarding capabilities. Using this interface, casinos would be able to answer their most pressing business questions by easily accessing day-level data and drilling-down for more detail as needed.

Vital, a Toshiba Medical Systems Company, is a leading provider of medical imaging and visualization software for clinicians. The complexity of its product line, from front-line healthcare solutions to back-end monitoring tools and machine-to-machine connectivity, made the sales pipeline and forecast complex. Vital tracks sales opportunities in Salesforce and manages orders using NetSuite. These applications don’t speak to each other, so the organization lacked the ability to compare forecasted, actual, and targeted performance. They needed a BI solution that could easily combine and analyze data maintained in different applications, creating a single, comprehensive source of the truth. They also wanted to avoid anything that would require a massive investment of time and resources, and needed a solution that would easily scale to meet their future needs.

KYDEX, a leader in specialty thermoplastic sheet manufacturing, was previously relying on a text-based ERP system for sales operations reports. The process was time-consuming and inefficient, requiring IT employees to export data and perform additional calculations related to each period’s billings and bookings. These static reports were then distributed to decision-makers who would have to contact IT for any additional analysis. When the company decided to change ERP systems, it saw an opportunity to implement a Business Intelligence (BI) solution as well.

Teach For All is a global network of independent social enterprises working to expand educational opportunities in their respective countries. The organization gathers and analyzes data related to key metrics such as organizational growth, teacher retention, and number of students reached to maximize learning and identify best practices across the network. Initially, Teach For All used time-consuming spreadsheets to combine and analyze the data. While the analysis proved valuable, the process was labor-intensive and not sustainable in the long term. The organization needed an analytics solution that could automate the process and expand the initiative.

True Textiles, a leading manufacturer of commercial textiles, was using a traditional, on-premise Business Intelligence (BI) solution for nearly a decade. While the solution helped to combine the company’s disparate data sources, it was difficult to use, with limited functionality. Its costly licensing model made expansion of the deployment prohibitively expensive, so a small group of administrative and IT users ran reports for the rest of the organization. As additional questions arose, reports were modified and run again in a time-consuming, cumbersome process that reduced employee productivity and slowed decision-making. As their expectations shifted, they began to look for an easy-to-use, self-service solution that would give them quick access to advanced functionality. They needed a solution that could expand beyond their sales department to help them cost-effectively improve performance across the organization.

Vertafore, a leading provider of insurance software and technology, wanted to leverage its wealth of raw data to launch an analytics product that would provide agents and carriers with key performance indicators (KPIs) and competitive intelligence. The insurance industry is facing disruption from various fronts, including carriers going direct to consumers, usage-based insurance, and search engines that provide consumers with competitive pricing. To manage against these competitive threats, agencies and carriers need to understand sales trends, customer retention, and benchmark against peers to measure progress and uncover opportunities. Vertafore's unique position in the industry provides it with data from sources across the policy lifecycle, making it uniquely positioned to collect, analyze, and distribute market insights that can improve its customers' competitive positioning.

Graydon, an international business information provider, was facing challenges in making use of its vast data every day. Each team within the company had their own reporting requirements and sources of data to consider. The Marketing team wanted to get more insight into how campaigns delivered revenue and financial results, but this required data from the Finance team. The existing visualization tool in place did not support the types of data that would be required for this extended project. It would also be difficult to integrate and make data available for everyone across the business to use.

Sunny Delight Beverages Co., a leading producer of juice-based drinks in North America, was facing a challenge with its legacy business intelligence applications. The company had eight different legacy business intelligence applications in place, all with independent silos of data. This led to conflicting figures being presented to executives as end users were working off unique silos of data. This disparity led to revenue unpredictability, lower margins than necessary, high inventory buffers, and a lack of understanding true profitability from sales promotions. The legacy systems SunnyD had in place were too monolithic to support user self-service and agility. End-user data discovery tools, on the other hand, would amplify existing data silos.

The Firm wanted to enable its 250 financial analysts with the most up-to-date information and also allow them to use Microsoft Excel, their tool of choice. Given the breadth of holdings – Equity, Fixed Income –analysts are evaluating securities, derivatives, options and any tradeable financial instrument; the data is highly complex. With global markets open around the clock, speed is a competitive requirement. The analysts had built a custom tool from Microsoft Excel that the legacy system in place, Oracle BI, wouldn’t integrate into. Any replacement system needed to have seamless integration into Excel. Market data from multiple sources requires transformations to make the data consumable for analysis. Oracle BI couldn’t perform these transformations rapidly enough for up-to-date intelligence. A replacement system needed to process millions of records rapidly.

As the business units of the Global Energy Management Company grew, they became frustrated with reporting latency while waiting on central IT and Oracle BI. In response, they deployed desktop discovery solutions for self-service analytics. However, these analytic silos created a rift between business and IT. The Company saw an opportunity to modernize BI, heal the rift with the business units by delivering true self-service, and leapfrog competition in a commodities market. The technical challenges included a rapid go-live requirement in a highly-complex environment against 200+ data sources, a global M&A agenda that would drive further data complexity, and requirements for true self-service with centralized governance.