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Castle Rock Water, a public utility in the rapidly growing town of Castle Rock, Colorado, was seeking a software management solution to improve its operations. The utility operates five major water treatment plants throughout the town, producing high-quality drinking water and generating approximately 16 million gallons per day during the summer months. The utility's second highest cost is power, and it was keen to monitor power consumption over its Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. The utility had installed power monitoring devices to monitor power demand on its deep well pumps, but it needed a solution that would provide the engineering staff with a baseline to give the operations staff the tools to make necessary changes in pumping operations through SCADA to maximize production while minimizing cost per gallon pumped.

The Town of Tonawanda was facing high support costs for their existing HMI/SCADA package and other third-party applications such as reporting solutions. The legacy system was expensive to maintain and did not provide the flexibility and scalability required for future expansion. The town was looking for a solution that would not only reduce their support costs but also provide a platform that they could build upon in the future. They needed a system that could support additional functionality such as wireless operator stations, the ability to stay connected via mobile phones, and more. The system also needed to be robust and reliable, with redundancy at multiple levels to ensure continuous operation.

Thermo Systems is a leader in the design and installation of mission critical PLC-based control systems. They specialize in the automation of validated pharmaceutical HVAC systems, utility systems, and validated manufacturing applications. However, the controls market has changed over the past few years, creating an ever-growing demand for open, standardized, and reliable software systems. Thermo Systems needed a software solution that could meet these demands, provide a wide range of programs and features, and comply with the latest FDA regulations.

Tefal SAS, a subsidiary of Groupe SEB, is a global leader in small household equipment. The company manufactures around 44 million products annually in a high energy-consuming process. The energy costs for manufacturing operations could reach as high as eight million euros, split between four million for electricity costs and four million for gas. Given these numbers, Tefal decided to launch an Energy Efficiency project to reduce manufacturing-related energy costs. The company began the project by making an energy diagnosis, in order to learn real-time consumption levels towards the goal of making improvements leading to energy-related savings. Tefal sought an energy management system that could be implemented without revising their existing architecture. They aimed to connect the new system to equipment already in place, using standard communication protocols such as OPC, for use of real-time data in addition to archiving and recovery.

Swiss Grid, an independent coordination company for the Swiss extra high voltage grid, is tasked with ensuring the security of the Swiss national transmission grid at all times, even under the intensive energy exchange between members of the interconnected European network. The company has developed and established the concept of operational congestion forecast with the UCTE-wide Day-Ahead Congestion Forecast (DACF) module as a kernel. However, the complex DACF algorithms needed to be fully automated and integrated into the daily congestion management process. The calculations are based upon actual data from partners within the European interconnected network, and data presence and quality needed to be continuously monitored. Swiss Grid network engineers needed a way to monitor and control the DACF process. The company also needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate with its network of power application systems, as well as with different national and international trading and scheduling systems.

STSI - Integrated Technical Services, located in Zagreb, Croatia, is involved with engineering, maintenance, research and production projects within the Croatian oil, gas and petroleum products industry. The company is part of the INA Group, which is a joint stock company owned by the Hungarian oil company MOL, the Republic of Croatia and private and institutional shareholders. The company decided that the datacenter in its Zagreb headquarters was becoming out-of-date and made plans for its replacement. The new datacenter was designed to include a backup power supply, air conditioning units and a soon-to-be-installed diesel generator. The company sought a SCADA system that would monitor and control crucial parameters such as power supply, temperature/humidity, AC status/mode, UPS status/mode, branch circuit current, individual circuit breaker status, raised floor conditions, technical security, and PLC status.

Butler Health System (BHS) was required to demonstrate to the federal government that it was using electronic health record (EHR) technology to earn incentive payments from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), as defined by the HITECH Act of 2009. There were a number of criteria that verified this “meaningful use” eligibility, including submitting Clinical Quality Metrics to CMS. BHS was also required to guide its pay-for-performance initiatives. Previously, its analysts created reports directly from operational reporting systems such as MEDITECH. They also used Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Reporting Services, Microsoft Analysis Services, and general-purpose BI tools from MicroStrategy. However, none of these tools provided what was needed to meet the Federal requirements for meaningful use or the detailed analysis required for the hospital’s pay-for-performance objectives.

Cambridge Memorial Hospital, a regional hospital in Ontario, Canada, was faced with the challenge of monitoring patient volumes, costs, and quality due to new provincial requirements. The Ontario Ministry of Health introduced quality-based procedures, under which hospitals are compensated based on the number of patients they look after, the services they deliver, the quality of those services, and the specific needs of the broader population they serve. The hospital's funding is based on the number of cases performed each year. To handle this effectively, Cambridge Memorial needed to replace its outdated manual reporting system with a more efficient and comprehensive solution.

BC Housing, a provincial crown agency that develops, manages and administers a wide range of subsidized housing services throughout British Columbia (B.C.), was facing challenges in streamlining the integration of internal systems and improving data sharing with external organizations. The agency was also struggling with profiling, consolidating, and cleansing data throughout the agency for a single source of truth. The process of applying for financial assistance was not user-friendly for citizens, which was another challenge that BC Housing wanted to address. The agency was using the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform for years to determine the levels of support for housing providers and develop comparative benchmarks for monitoring financial compliance and performance. However, the agency wanted to expand its use of Information Builders technology by using iWay integration solutions to combine data from various types of internal systems into a common source and format, as well as to create direct links with external systems from BC Housing’s growing list of partners.

The Ministry of Alberta Seniors and Community Supports was facing challenges in providing a proactive approach to reporting and developing efficient procedures for addressing client needs. Processors had limited access to client data, which slowed down the processing of client requests. Managers also had difficulty tracking workers’ performance. The ministry was also facing internal growth and demand for its services escalated. Users at various levels of the organization needed a simple, easy-to-use interface, the power to accurately drill down through the information, and the ability to export information in a wide range of reporting formats.

Cardiac Surgery Associates (CSA) was facing a challenge with its siloed environment comprised of diverse systems which made it difficult to generate reports about the state of its medical business. As the number of patients grew, the ability to deliver accurate information to stakeholders became crucial to providing elite service. Business administrators were forced to spend countless hours compiling information from various sources, then manually enter it into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. CSA’s technology infrastructure is comprised of numerous disparate data sources that lacked integration. This setup presented many obstacles when it came to combining data for the purposes of reporting and analysis.

Cascades, a packaging and tissue products manufacturer, was implementing SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications across its numerous mills, plants, and paper manufacturing facilities. This was part of an enterprise-wide strategy to reengineer financials, procurement, purchasing, production planning, warehouse management, plant maintenance, and other essential business functions. However, a significant challenge in this multi-year SAP deployment involved integrating the new SAP environment with the existing infrastructure. Cascades needed integration technology to monitor shop floor equipment and seamlessly move data, messages, and transactions across this complex infrastructure.

CDS Global, a leading provider of outsourced business solutions to publishers, direct marketers, and other types of businesses, faced the challenge of duplicating the capabilities of a robust reporting environment in a software as a service (SaaS) offering. The goal was to enable media and consumer product clients to securely access, analyze, and visualize circulation, fulfillment, and order management data via the Internet. The company wanted to improve its existing reports to enable publishers to make fast, knowledgeable decisions and manage their businesses more efficiently. The need was to provide clients with an easy-to-use, web-based reporting solution that could give them a clear view of their business metrics, for example, with charts and graphs.

As CEMEX increased in size, IT leaders realized that the volume and variety of operational data they had to process would soon overwhelm their IT environment. For example, when it came to reporting, it was difficult to achieve a consolidated view of financial and operational activities, which severely impacted decision-making throughout the company. The corporate comptroller, responsible for providing critical financial and operational information to the vice president of finance, was especially challenged to manage the influx of information.

CentiMark Corporation, a commercial and industrial roofing contractor, was looking to build on its successful BI strategy with new applications and an enhanced user experience. The company had previously purchased the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform from Information Builders to create and deploy a customer-facing BI portal, MyCentiMark.com. This application helped clients manage various projects across multiple locations by tracking budgets, proposals, recommendations, conditions, work in progress, job histories, and other important information. However, CentiMark wanted to further build on the success of MyCentiMark.com by expanding and modifying the environment, creating new applications for internal users, and incorporating interactive, self-service BI apps into the customer-facing application.

Central Parking System (CPS) was facing a challenge of inconsistent financial and operational reporting data. The company's management team needed a convenient way to quickly assess the performance of the business on a real-time basis. Most of the reports were static PDF files that lacked interactivity and were difficult for managers to decipher. The company leaders needed a system that could accurately view performance metrics. To achieve this management objective, CPS decided to use a business intelligence (BI) platform to create a financial dashboard that pulls information from several different data sources and presents a consistent, unified view of company activities.

Central Washington University (CWU) was heavily reliant on an Oracle PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for most of its reporting activities. However, the process was slow, laborious, and paper-intensive. Some queries took 20 minutes or longer to execute, which impacted the performance of the ERP system and sometimes caused it to crash. Keeping up with state and federal compliance requirements was particularly difficult. For example, one report for the Public Centralized Higher Education Enrollment System (PCHEES) included hundreds of pages and took eight months to produce. The university also had to create large reports for U.S. News & World Report, ACT, and Petersons. This meant the reporting team had to respond to dozens of public requests from state agencies and create more than 100 internal reports each year.

CBIZ, a professional services company in the U.S., provides a comprehensive range of outsourced business services, products, and solutions to help organizations manage their finances, employees, and technology. Over the years, the company followed an enterprise software strategy that included purchasing best-of-breed software applications for human resources (HR), customer relationship management (CRM), time and billing, scheduling, and other key operations. These applications rely on relational databases, such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, to store and share information. However, the organization’s small IT team struggled to integrate those systems cohesively. CBIZ had difficulty creating a uniform, high-quality data store that ensured accuracy and minimized manual data entry and auditing procedures.

Cetera Financial Group, one of the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer/RIA firms, wanted to increase revenue by providing powerful technology offerings to its independent financial advisor network with an emphasis on enhanced reporting. The company wanted to offer visually rich financial reports and industry-leading practice management tools that enable advisors to be extremely responsive to clients. The challenge was to find a business intelligence (BI) solution that could pull data from multiple back-end systems in a cohesive way, with advanced graphing, scheduling, and report-distribution capabilities, with only one or two clicks required to access important content.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) had been collecting data on criminal activity for many years. However, the department relied on a manual process of sifting through 13 disparate data sources to analyze crime statistics, identify trends, and model resource allocations. This process was inefficient and time-consuming, making it difficult for the department 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. During the RFP process, they asked the chief, line officers, and other personnel what they wanted to see from an information system and what types of information they wanted to provide to officers in the field. Based on this feedback, they established guidelines for the project and sought proposals from technology vendors.

Chrome River, a company that provides software products for expense management, needed to integrate a robust reporting solution in a lightweight, web-based deployment model. They wanted to establish flexible pricing to complement a subscription-based SaaS model. The company was looking for a powerful, flexible, easy-to-use analytics framework that could be embedded in their SaaS platform. They also needed a solution that could support their security and multitenancy requirements.

Addison, Texas, a bustling town with a thriving business community, was faced with budget reductions and the challenge of managing its growing community with fluctuating and limited resources. The city's top managers and council members needed a clearer view into the financial and operational performance metrics of the city. They required real-time metrics about factors that affect Addison’s solvency, such as adhering to budgets and maintaining visibility into public safety issues, public works activities, economic development issues, the activities of the courts, and the myriad proceedings that impact the town and ensure its viability.

The City of Brampton, Canada's second-fastest-growing city, faced a challenge in managing its assets due to rapid population growth. The Public Service Accounting Board (PSAB) issued a Tangible Capital Assets (TCA) request for accurate reporting of all City assets, which was difficult due to the information being maintained in more than a dozen different asset management applications. The city's IT department had to support the information management needs of multiple projects among many departments, leading to a disparate set of applications and data sources, making it difficult to easily exchange information. They had no overarching integration strategy, no cohesive master data management (MDM) solution, and no trained staff available to remedy the situation.

The City of Charlotte, North Carolina, lacked a centralized repository for managing physical and mailing address information. This deficiency led to duplicate or erroneous address records that created additional challenges with service delivery. Inaccurate address information was able to creep into databases whenever a name was misspelled or a duplicate address was entered. City staff members often discovered address anomalies but there was latency involved in resolving the data issues and updating the associated databases. All of these data quality issues cost money by requiring extra resources for resolution.

The City of Cincinnati was faced with the challenge of creating a self-service reporting system that would empower nearly 1,000 users in various departments such as Finance, Waterworks, Sewage District, and other agencies to create, share, and distribute information. The city needed to enable ad hoc and standardized reporting options from the city’s intranet, devise a simple way to export certified financial data to Excel, create a parameterized reporting environment for non-technical users, and automate the selection and distribution of information by e-mail. The city was also looking to modernize its information-delivery capabilities and construct a pervasive reporting architecture.

The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, a non-profit organization in Powell, Ohio, was facing difficulty in tracking expenses against budgets and understanding how campaigns and membership drives were progressing relative to annual goals. The organization lacked reports for day-to-day analysis of the operation. The zoo needed to ensure that it uses its funds appropriately and managers needed to track performance metrics for each part of the organization on a daily basis. To enable this type of real-time intelligence, the Zoo decided to standardize on Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform.

The Houston Police Department, responsible for the safety of over 2.1 million people, was facing the challenge of providing instantaneous access to vital information to officers responding to incidents. The department had a data warehouse containing historic crime data, but the analysis of this data was complex and often redundant, as it was conducted using handwritten SQL requests or complex Microsoft Access queries. The department wanted to create a real-time crime center (RTCC) to collect critical data and push it directly to officers via their mobile devices. They also wanted to deploy a dashboard that allows chiefs and captains to better manage their districts.

The City of Irving, Texas, which supports 24 service departments, was looking to create a culture of transparency and accountability. The existing performance measurements were activity-based and not tied to departmental goals and funding allocations. As a result, measurement selections and outcomes were not adequately discussed. The city wanted to improve its ability to monitor performance and trends across all city departments and provide transparency into its administrative processes.

The City of Irving Police Department was facing a challenge of accessing and interpreting the vast amount of data collected from their newly implemented Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems and Records Management Systems (RMS) from Tiburon, Inc. The influx of information made it clear that the department needed a more intuitive way for officers, analysts, and command staff to search the database and create timely reports. The department needed a business intelligence (BI) environment that would allow the force to rapidly obtain relevant insight about people, places, things, events, or other issues in a cohesive and understandable way.

The Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) was faced with the challenge of improving crime prevention by integrating information from over 27 diverse sources and making it readily available to law enforcement officers. The department aimed to take a proactive approach to policing by forming a Law Enforcement Resource Center (LERC) to promote the efficient sharing and analysis of current crime data. However, before any information sharing and analysis could take place, KCPD needed to bring together and streamline data from more than 27 sources.