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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.

Despite their global reach, the Upwork team runs lean. But with over 5 million companies posting jobs and a community of 12 million freelancers, the team struggled to diagnose changing conditions, quantify the impact to the business, and quickly recommend a clear course of action. The team had a rich set of dashboards that showed when key metrics like revenue and job fill rates changed, but understanding why those KPIs fluctuated required hours or weeks of manual investigation in spreadsheets and BI tools.

Samsung’s marketing and analytics teams faced the challenge of understanding upgrade preferences across various demographics, device profiles, and carrier loyalty. With traditional BI tools, digging deeper into the data to answer these questions could take weeks. The complexity and volume of data, including customer demographics, location, device preferences, and past interactions, made it difficult to reliably check every possible factor. Samsung needed a solution that could handle the scale and complexity of their data to optimize their product launches and better target customers.

HomeToGo’s Data & Analytics team faced challenges in reducing time spent on manual analysis, accelerating KPI investigation, increasing A/B testing, and promoting self-service and data engagement across the business. As the business and data continued to grow, it became clear that business intelligence alone wasn’t enough to scale the questions of the business. The team sometimes dedicated over a week’s worth of manual analysis to diagnose key business metric declines, which was not scalable. They needed a better, faster way to perform analysis, speed up data exploration, and surface more actionable insights while providing more business user engagement than static BI reports alone.

Ro, a direct-to-patient healthcare company, faced the challenge of managing a complex and rapidly expanding data pipeline. With the exponential rise in demand for telemedicine, Ro expanded its treatment areas significantly. This growth required the data team to monitor and analyze various factors driving the patient journey. The team needed to quickly understand changes in data trends and determine the critical drivers behind these changes. The challenge was to find a Decision Intelligence Engine that could keep pace with the business's rapid growth and provide actionable insights in real-time.

At Gusto, Jasmine’s unique data team uses advanced analytics to ensure Gusto is continually improving the services it provides. To do so, Jasmine needed to monitor more than a simple CSAT or NPS score. Instead, they developed an intricate Customer Health Score based on over 130 factors to assess a customer's overall health and identify factors that impacted customer experience. When these scores start to change, her team has to quickly and efficiently diagnose the factors impacting customer health and clearly answer how customer behavior, customer experience, and demographic data are combining to impact customer health and retention. While Jasmine could see when metrics were changing with tools like Tableau and Redash, diagnosing why was much more complex and time-consuming — only allowing her team to deliver surface-level insights without recommended action. She needed a scalable solution that would accelerate her analysis and improve the depth of insights they could derive from customer data to support business decisions. That's when they turned to Sisu.

As VP of Demand Marketing and Marketing Operations at Fractory, Heikki Tilk is tasked with determining where to focus his acquisitions and optimization efforts to efficiently convert and retain customers. To do so, Heikki finds the factors and subfactors that identify high-value customer segments and uses those insights to drive decisions for Fractory’s Sales and Marketing teams. Heikki needed an analytics engine that could do data exploration for him, allowing him to find answers quickly and drive decisions for the Sales and Marketing teams. Unfortunately, after searching more than twenty BI providers, he found that most didn’t have the core function for relational mapping between tables that he needed to make sense of his complex marketing and sales data. Heikki needed an analytics tool that was part of a modern analytics stack. That’s when he turned to Sisu.

As a small business with 8(a) status, IntellecTechs aimed to achieve 100% growth within five years by 2018, a goal they successfully met. The company sought to continue its aggressive growth strategy by targeting specific government agencies and leveraging timely information on upcoming opportunities. To achieve this, IntellecTechs needed a reliable source of market intelligence to identify procurement relationships and forecasted spending in categories matching their key capabilities. The challenge was to find a platform that could provide comprehensive data, analysis, and alerts to help them stay competitive and win more government contracts.

DCS had been using Federal Business Opportunities (FBO), Commerce Business Daily (CBD), and NECO (Navy Portal), along with its established relations within DOD and the Prime community to build its intelligence. The firm realized that it needed a more comprehensive solution that provided complete market intelligence in order to grow its footprint in the federal contracting market. With the goal in mind to generate revenue, DCS sought out a solution that could acquire actionable RFP and contact information to drive business development and market activities.

Ease of doing business is key for the Kaduna State Government (KDSG)—which oversees and regulates the populous Kaduna state in Nigeria’s North West. To help its Environmental Protection Authority (KEPA) serve local businesses better, KDSG deployed an intuitive web portal for Environmental Impact Assessment submissions and payments, using Microsoft Azure App Service and Power BI. The agency also developed an integrated reporting dashboard, allowing it to assess document processing efficiency across other ministries. As part of its core responsibilities, KEPA issues Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) certificates, ensuring that the area’s rich biodiversity and natural resources are not adversely affected by human development. To deliver on this mandate requiring fast processing times, little duplication, and high transparency, the Kaduna State Government (KDSG) needed to automate the EIA submission process.

Meijer, a major regional supercenter chain, faced challenges in understanding operational performance and customer behavior due to aggressive competition, hundreds of stores, and a wide range of products. The company had a wealth of data but lacked a consistent way to tap into it across the organization. Meijer used various technologies, including a data warehouse based on Teradata, a homegrown BI tool, and reporting software from other vendors. However, business users heavily relied on IT to extract insights from data, leading to delays and inefficiencies. Marilyn Richards, Director of Business Intelligence and Collaboration at Meijer, aimed to create a more self-sufficient environment where business customers could access relevant and timely reporting without waiting for IT to build every report.

Kennametal faced challenges in tapping into its vast intellectual property and managing data effectively. Despite implementing an SAP ERP system, extracting and working with data remained difficult. Employees used various analytics tools, but none met the company's goals for detailed analytics. The proliferation of uncontrolled documents and data saved to desktops posed a security risk. Kennametal needed a centralized, powerful, and easy-to-use business intelligence (BI) solution.

One of the largest K–12 education systems in Indiana, MSDLT has approximately 15,000 students across 22 schools near downtown Indianapolis. The school district already had a high achievement rate, but it wanted to get even better. A technology innovator, MSDLT believes that finding new ways to work with data holds the key to promoting student success. Although grades and attendance records are important measurements, they don’t tell the whole story. To keep students on track, the school district wanted to more efficiently correlate “soft data”—such as behavioral incidents and other day-to-day observations—with grades and other metrics. But while grades and attendance records were kept in a centralized student information system, teachers’ notes were scattered across email and documents in a variety of computers and devices. The information silos created multiple hurdles. Even when the notes were entered into the student information system, making sense of the unstructured information for disciplinary referrals or other reporting could be challenging. And collaborating to improve student performance could be difficult too. RTI meetings, which typically include a roundtable discussion with teachers, social workers, guidance counselors, and administrators, weren’t as efficient as they could be. Faculty spent most of their limited time trying to pull together incomplete social, academic, and behavioral findings.

Choosing Wisely Canada is a campaign aimed at reducing unnecessary medical tests and treatments. Hôpital Montfort in Ottawa, Ontario, needed a way to provide physicians with performance data to help them make informed decisions about lab and imaging interventions. The hospital's existing tools for creating medical reports were time-consuming and lacked interactivity, requiring significant IT department involvement. This made it difficult for physicians to access real-time, specific data needed to reduce unnecessary tests.

Metro Bank, a rapidly growing bank in London, needed a business intelligence (BI) solution to provide deeper and more detailed information about customer interactions across various channels such as stores, online, telephony, and mobile. As the bank expanded, it faced challenges in delivering the right information to the right people at the right time to maintain its innovative and personalized customer service. The existing BI solution was insufficient for the bank's growing needs, prompting the search for a more dynamic, visually appealing, and user-friendly solution.

Condé Nast, a globally recognized media company, faced challenges in gaining insights into the performance of its multiple brands and media types. The Marketing and Analytics team needed better business intelligence (BI) tools to provide analytics information quickly to internal sales and editorial teams. The team struggled with limited analytics capabilities and correlating data from disparate sources, which was difficult and time-consuming. Additionally, they often fielded redundant requests from internal clients, leading to inefficiencies. Condé Nast wanted a centralized solution that would pull together disparate data sources and provide self-service BI capabilities to push insights out to magazines and respond proactively instead of reacting to individual requests.

The pre-existing solution no longer addressed the organisational challenges faced by Lootah; it was not scalable and has become a major challenge to tackle on the company’s growth path. The lack of integration between the back and front office caused inconsistencies in reconciling sales data as mismatched information needed to be verified manually. This, in turn, caused delays and added to the workload of each staff member.

In order to increase its efficiency, R-Pharm needed to centralize and make transparent its relationships with partners and customers. Additionally, the company required a solution to automate logistics and financial processes to comply with good manufacturing practice standards. Extensive market research was conducted to find a highly adaptable, productive, and user-friendly platform. The Microsoft Dynamics AX platform was selected for its innovative solutions and software products, meeting all required criteria.