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Niemann Foods Inc., a regional retail store operator with approximately 100 stores in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, was battling for market share in the Midwest with a number of national and regional retail operators. With $650 million in annual sales, Niemann’s goal was to be a $1 billion company. This aggressive growth strategy drove the company’s senior managers to purchase Information Builders WebFOCUS, a business intelligence (BI) and analytics environment that delivers vital information to people at every level of the organization. The company was looking to develop an operational reporting environment that tracks sales activity, gross profits, and the movement of products. The retailer’s pervasive vision for end-user reporting entrusts business users with manipulating data, rather than requiring the IT department to continually develop reports in response to each request.

North American Lighting (NAL) was using a legacy reporting system to monitor its continuous manufacturing operations. However, when the legacy system was retired, the company saw it as an opportunity to standardize on a more versatile reporting system. The challenge was to consolidate disparate reporting tools to reduce costs and increase the number of report developers. The company needed a system that could deliver real-time data about shop floor operations as the pace of production accelerated. The IT department was tasked with migrating more than 150 legacy reports into the new environment and creating more than 100 new reports.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (NCFB) was facing several challenges. The company was using a manual process of writing COBOL batch programs to move data from one platform to another. This process was labor-intensive and consumed mainframe cycles, making the mainframe unavailable for ad hoc query and reporting activities. NCFB wanted to make claims and payment information available via the Web and reduce the load on mainframe information systems. The company also wanted to work with compressed DB2 data. To address these challenges, NCFB decided to build a data warehouse that could be periodically refreshed from the mainframe DB2 data. The warehouse, residing on a Microsoft Windows NT platform, would always be available for live queries, thus sparing the mainframe the arduous task of fielding ad hoc requests.

nVision Global, a leading provider of services for freight bill auditing and payment, logistics management, and claims processing, was looking to implement sophisticated analytics that incorporate interactive graphs and map-based reports. The goal was to provide customers with detailed information on shipping routes, rates, logistics, and carrier contracts. The company wanted to create a secure, web-based dashboard that lets customers view their logistics information online through a SaaS model. However, the existing reporting was limited and required extensive staff support. nVision wanted to take these services to the next level and make clients self-sufficient by adding more analytical functionality, better drill-down capabilities, and a more elegant user experience.

OFS Brands, a leading supplier of contract furniture, was facing a challenge with its reporting process. The company used to send standard reports to its sales force via email. However, these reports were not interactive and did not allow for ad hoc queries, data visualization, or drill-downs. If a sales representative needed specific information, they would have to request the IT department to develop a custom report. This process was not efficient and put a heavy load on the IT department. The company wanted to give the sales team more control and reduce the custom reporting load on the IT department.

Oxford Properties Group, a global commercial real estate owner, developer, and manager, needed to upgrade its business intelligence (BI) infrastructure to simplify the demands of managing its properties. The company required advanced reporting and analysis capabilities to support its plans for global expansion. The challenge was to develop an enterprise BI solution that could deliver information from a data warehouse or production system across multiple platforms and databases. The company also needed a system that could infuse information into the daily activities of busy property managers.

Ozburn-Hessey Logistics (OHL) was facing a challenge in providing its customers with timely and accurate reporting about its performance across all its lines of business. The company had a different customer-facing web application for each of its four lines of business: freight forwarding, customs brokerage, warehousing/e-fulfillment, and transportation. Each application had a separate URL and required a unique log-in procedure. This made the reporting process time-consuming and cumbersome. OHL recognized that multiple websites and manual reporting did not represent a world-class experience. They wanted to provide customers with a user-friendly, one-stop portal that could deliver comprehensive performance information for all lines of business.

Paradies Lagardère, a retail chain operating in airports across the U.S. and Canada, was looking to streamline its business operations and merchandising procedures. The company wanted to unlock information trapped in its legacy systems and enable advanced data analysis, reporting, and forecasting. The goal was to acquire an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution that could provide consistent and timely insight into corporate performance, create more accurate forecasts, and help store managers maximize the effectiveness of promotional and merchandising strategies.

Parker Hannifin Corporation, a leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies, was facing a challenge in deriving focused, customized reports from data stored on the corporate mainframe. The company had committed itself to a corporate-wide Win Strategy – a comprehensive continuous-improvement program based on a three-tiered foundation: premier customer service, strong financial performance, and profitable growth. However, measuring the results in a quantitative way wasn’t easy as IT professionals had to supply continually updated information about the many tasks and transactions contained in the Win Strategy metrics. The company needed to create an integrated, enterprise-wide reporting environment that allows users to easily obtain customized reports based on focused subsets of data from the corporate mainframe, and other data sources in the future.

Paycor, a provider of human resource (HR) management services, wanted to give its clients a more comprehensive view of HR operations by extending existing solutions with advanced analysis and data visualization capabilities. The company sought to integrate a full-featured BI platform into its product suite, unifying data from different product databases and providing users with innovative functionality. The goal was to provide information within its application workflows to make it easier for end users.

Pershing LLC, a leading provider of clearing and financial services outsourcing solutions, was facing a challenge. They needed to find a way to deliver targeted analytical information to tens of thousands of busy brokers without requiring them to learn a report writer or deal with cryptic database technology. The company serves more than 1,100 financial organizations and independent investment advisors, who collectively represent nearly six million individual investors. Pershing has more than $800 billion on under administration. Previously these investment professionals could only access customer information via hard copy reports or standard files containing all their data, which they had to manage and use on their own. NetExchange Pro had some rudimentary reporting capabilities, but they were geared toward accessing information one account at a time or one investment professional at a time. As a result, many of these external users were requesting custom reports from Pershing’s IT department, which was putting a drain on programming resources.

Physicians Mutual Insurance Company (PMIC) was facing a challenge with its multiple systems used to administer its policies. The company had to go through tedious processes to extract data, store it in databases, and create custom reports for policy-owner and claims administration, financial auditing, underwriting, and other business functions. The company wanted to enable business users to address their own business intelligence (BI), reporting, and information-distribution needs without having to depend heavily on IT for custom data-access and analysis activities.

Plex Systems Inc. is a developer of the Plex Manufacturing Cloud, a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for the manufacturing enterprise. The company's customers had to create reports in an SQL programming environment, which was not user-friendly. They needed a better way to empower users to access, analyze, and visualize ERP data. The challenge was to find a solution that could be easily integrated into the Plex Manufacturing Cloud and would allow users to create their own business intelligence environments, complete with customizable portals, dashboards, and a wide variety of reports.

Plus Relocation Services, a company that provides domestic and international relocation services, was losing business due to its reporting shortfalls. The company lost three major contracts, which represented more than $2 million in lost revenue. The prospective clients informed Plus Relocation that the company’s reporting shortfalls were the primary reason for their decisions to select other vendors. Plus Relocation’s former customer-facing information systems lacked usability and sizzle. The company needed a business intelligence solution powerful enough to revamp the company’s information systems and flexible enough to create easy-to-use dashboards for internal and external users.

PNC Bank’s National Financial Services Center, responsible for customer inquiries and transactions, was facing a challenge in providing a more responsive and comprehensive performance monitoring system for the call center. The existing mainframe reporting system was limited and the reporting data was scattered among many different applications and databases. Scheduling alone took one full day every two weeks and the resulting hardcopy reports weren’t delivered until two or three days later. The team of Adam Silber and Aaron Leaman, Performance Metrics Analysts for PNC Bank’s National Financial Services Center, were asked to set up a highly responsive performance monitoring and reporting mechanism, both for managers and Financial Services Consultants (FSCs).

PostFinance Ltd, a leading Swiss retail financial institution, was facing challenges with its existing BI platform. The platform lacked functionality and flexibility, making reporting cumbersome and leading to a low user adoption rate. The company's existing BI tools were not embraced by the user community due to their lack of flexibility and functionality. As a result, many departments supplemented these basic BI tools with Microsoft Excel, leading to a heterogeneous BI landscape that ran counter to the information strategy and target architecture, and made system maintenance more complex.

Prym Consumer USA, one of the largest manufacturers and distributor of sewing, quilting, and craft-related products in North America, needed to interface with SAP to manage thousands of daily EDI transactions from Wal-Mart, Amazon, Michaels, and Jo-Ann Stores. The company had to replace an end-of-life electronic data interchange (EDI) system that links the company’s ERP system with its automated distribution systems. The SAP/EDI links had to be seamless as Prym's large trading partners insisted on EDI communications. Prym uses 14 different EDI message types to interact with more than a dozen trading partners. The company also needed to streamline the cycle of sending invoices and automated shipment notices.

Queensway Carleton Hospital (QCH) was struggling to comply with Canada’s performance-based funding model. The staff needed self-service analytic dashboards that could correlate information from diverse sources. The hospital was under increased financial pressure due to Canada’s performance-based funding system. This payment model rewards physicians, hospitals, and medical groups for meeting quality and efficiency measures, while penalizing poor outcomes, medical errors, and runaway costs. Complying with these funding requirements involves analyzing hospital processes, reviewing patient outcomes, identifying areas for improvement, and predicting patient trends. The hospital needs to be able to easily access, combine, and analyze a broad array of data to determine how much funding it will receive. To meet these and other information management requirements, QCH used to have four full-time employees focused solely on creating and managing reports. Yet even with that sustained effort, it was difficult to obtain accurate clinical data that revealed what was happening in the emergency room and other cornerstone programs, such as childbirth, geriatrics, mental health, rehabilitation, and medical and surgical services.

Changes in government funding required Quinte Health Care (QHC) to cut $10 million from its operating budget. The company needed better business intelligence tools for easier access to information and analytics, so decision-makers could understand where money could be saved. The new funding approach, known as Health System Funding Reform (HSFR), comprises the health-based allocation model (HBAM) and Quality-Based Procedures (QBP). This strategy provides the government with an evidence-based method for distributing funds. Every year, healthcare takes a larger portion of the tax base and the government wants to mitigate the huge variation in care and outcomes across Canada’s hospitals. There is also a shift in fund allocation, from hospitals to community health centers and home care, as it becomes increasingly clear that people recover more quickly if they can be released from hospitals sooner and moved to another setting.

RBC Royal Bank, Canada’s largest bank, needed to provide real-time loan status information to its asset-based lending (ABL) customers. The major difference between asset-based lending and traditional commercial lending is control. The asset-based lending group at RBC focuses its due diligence on understanding the makeup and status of the borrower’s collateral so the bank can maximize the borrower’s margin availability based on the underlying value of its current assets, accounts receivable, and inventory. This involves a daily or weekly analysis, the results of which must be available to lending managers and customers at all times. Several major software vendors provide ABL solutions that perform these calculations. However, while the ABL application RBC uses has a Web-based reporting interface for this purpose, IT professionals at the bank were reluctant to use it because of concerns about security. In order to use the vendor’s solution, critical customer data – which RBC always keeps behind its firewall – would have to be copied to the vendor’s servers, opening up the possibility for substantial confidentiality risks.

RDC inMotiv, a leading IT and business services provider for the mobility service industry in the Benelux region of northern Europe, needed to streamline the exchange of information among all the relevant players in the automotive supply chain. This entailed managing massive amounts of data from 25,000 Dutch automotive companies with 100,000 employees and more than 12 million vehicles. The organization needed to find a better way to access data from a wide variety of sources, analyze it, and mine specific information about vehicle owners and potential customers. The recent changes in the automotive market, such as the increase in internet car sales and shrinking profit margins, drove a critical need for real-time customer intelligence. Market leaders succeed by gathering as much insight as they can about their existing and potential clients, establishing long-term relationships, and carefully tracking every transaction.

Renown Health, a healthcare leader in northern Nevada, faced a challenge in accessing statistical and financial information to understand the factors impacting productivity and the bottom line. Administrators, department managers, and other leaders needed this information to enforce accountability, control staff positions, comply with state regulations, and negotiate with physicians and provider groups. The organization also faced difficulties in using SAP BusinessObjects for financial reporting, which led to the need for a more efficient solution.

Ricoh Leasing, a company that leases products such as medical equipment, industrial machine tools, and vehicles, and provides collection, loan, and financial services for these leases, was facing challenges with its data warehouse system. The system was slow, required a lot of paper, data was not being used effectively or practically and security was questionable. The field staff, who deal with many different kinds of customers, had developed their own systems for handling customer information. The data warehouse system, as it was originally designed and implemented, did not catch on with the field. The original business intelligence tool was attractive for power users, but not for most people in the field, who were used to their own different systems and did not have the time to learn a new tool that did not exactly suit their needs. To make it more accessible, the Information Systems Division switched from a client/server-based to a Web-based system. This, however, made the cost prohibitive, because licensing was based on the number of users, and with Web-based access the number of users was now potentially the whole company. The Web-based system also raised security concerns.

Schneider Electric, a leading provider of solutions that deliver business value to customers by enabling them to do more with less energy, was facing a challenge. The company's rapid growth demanded that its ability to maximize operational efficiencies aided by a dynamic BI platform was critical. It was increasingly clear that it needed to replace its enterprise reporting solutions. The company needed a business intelligence (BI) environment that could support the reporting needs of all types of users without sacrificing flexibility or ease of use. The company wanted to create reporting dashboards that could immediately generate custom reports through a self-service environment. They also wanted to use Active Reports and report-scheduling software to update and share information and create WebFOCUS alerts to manage by exception and automate key business processes.

Scotiabank, a premier financial institution in North America, was facing challenges with its outdated sales information infrastructure. The existing system was causing delays in the delivery and validation of key information needed to support critical growth strategies. The bank's retail banking executives needed to automate a complex sales reporting process for their branch operations. The manual sales reporting process was dependent on officer input, leading to inconsistencies in reported results across the bank's 1,024 branches. The interpretation of complex business rules in the manual system resulted in inconsistency of reported results. The bank wanted to replace this manual system with an automated one that captures sales opportunities and then reports the data back to sales officers in the form of coaching and sales results reports.

Shikun & Binui Group, a leading infrastructure and real estate group in Israel, was facing the challenge of establishing a single source of truth for financial and operational reporting and analytics that enforces consistency among autonomous business entities. The group includes seven main business activities that are involved in the financing and construction of large-scale projects, infrastructure, residential neighborhoods, commercial structures, and public buildings, both in Israel and abroad. The group's first BI project was centered on corporate-level financial and operational reporting and analytics. In addition to implementing a BI system to support consolidated financial reporting, the group envisioned a BI environment that would permit managers to monitor operational activity by day, week, month, and quarter.

SMACL Assurances, a mutual insurance association of local authorities, was faced with the challenge of complying with Solvency II regulations. These regulations required the company to maintain high-quality business data to reduce the risk of insolvency. The company was also dealing with redundant, erroneous, and duplicate data within its information systems, which could negatively impact policies, claims, marketing opportunities, customer support, and other essential business processes. The senior managers at SMACL Assurances launched a data governance initiative to improve the accuracy of key data sources. They aimed to go beyond mere compliance with Solvency II and improve the overall customer experience through timely, accurate, and relevant information exchanges.

The California Department of Health Services (DHS) was facing a challenge in making it easier for program managers to stay on budget by accelerating access to critical financial data. The department was using a variety of software applications to help managers stay on budget. However, the speed at which users could get the information they needed and react was not satisfactory. The department was using the California State Accounting and Reporting System (CALSTARS) – a mainframe accounting system developed in the early 1980s. CALSTARS is a powerful and comprehensive system, but its limited reporting functionality made it difficult for budget managers to obtain specific information when they needed it most. The department wanted to enhance its support services to keep up with the growth of the state.

The Michigan State Police Department (MSPD) was facing a challenge in accessing vital criminal, incident, and activity data from a variety of disparate sources. The department wanted to make it easier and more consistent for commanders and other headquarters staff to access this information. The data was inconsistently retrieved and analyzed across the department, with some users relying on Crystal Reports, others on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The department wanted to promote uniformity in what information was accessed and how it was viewed and compared.

The Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) is tasked with providing public assistance programs, services, and resources to Oklahoma’s most needy and vulnerable residents. With an annual operating budget of $700 million and $1.4 billion in annual distributions to citizens, OKDHS has massive reporting requirements. On one hand, it must generate reports that verify compliance with federal regulations and program requirements. On the other, it must manage caseloads for thousands of employees supporting tens of thousands of residents. The agency needed a reporting system that would help them to make strategic decisions by supplying compliance information in response to federally mandated regulations, and help caseworkers and supervisors to efficiently manage a dynamic case load.