Fresno Pacific University is the California Central Valley’s only accredited Christian university, offering leading academic programs, ethical and spiritual development through traditional bachelor’s degree, adult degree completion, master’s, and certificate and credentialing programs. The Institutional Research Office does all the ad hoc, internal, and external reporting for the University, primarily from the student information system. Consistent, accurate, and immediate data is imperative to the University’s operation. Fresno Pacific needed an affordable way to access this data that was secure, easy to use, and accessible for virtually anyone to create and customize reports in minutes without help from database experts. The requirements they had were fairly straightforward – an affordable solution that worked with their existing database to provide more sophisticated reporting than what already existed.

With decades of industry experience, APT understands that one of the greatest business challenges facing not-for-profit organizations is effectively managing and communicating with members, contacts and donors. The company’s Stratum Membership Management software solution helps organizations gain control over their member information and leverage this information to save money, increase efficiencies, boost member communications, retention, loyalty and donations, and improve staff productivity. In support of these organizational objectives, the ability for APT customers to access accurate member data from Stratum’s U2 database quickly and easily is critical. They needed to securely produce customizable reports based on real-time data that would support decision making and enhance performance to improve the bottom line. APT recognized this market need for a powerful, easy-to-use reporting solution, but the company’s proprietary Stratum software lacked a web-based reporting component. This presented APT with a unique opportunity to respond to market demand by enhancing the company’s product offering. But first the company needed to either build upon their own capabilities or partner with a web-based reporting solution provider.

The IT team at Chapman University faced a significant challenge in providing self-service reporting capabilities to reduce the resources committed to customized reports. End-users across several departments were highly dependent on the IT department for assistance with reporting tasks, such as creating computed columns. This dependency led to a backlog of requests and delayed access to necessary information. The goal was to eliminate the multiple requests IT was receiving and provide faster results to end-users.

During Carson-Newman’s Datatel® implementation, they unfortunately found themselves the victim of a forged accounts payable check. Even though their implementation schedule was swamped with critical deadlines, the VP for Finance insisted they implement a Positive Pay process immediately, which required them to notify the bank of all check data prior to releasing checks. With the Positive Pay process, checks presented for payment are then validated with the information previously submitted to the bank. However, Positive Pay is not functionality available within Datatel Colleague® and staff were not yet experienced enough to customize the software to accomplish this task. This presented a significant challenge for the I.T. staff.

More than 75,000 IT executives and professionals in Canada rely on IT World Canada’s technology information. As the Canadian affiliate of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s largest IT information provider, IT World Canada is the leading Canadian online multimedia information provider.\n\nIT World Canada prides itself on knowing its readers’ interests and information requirements in order to be the trusted provider of targeted, focused content they seek. A large part of IT World Canada’s business is producing and managing hundreds of marketing campaigns per year for a wide variety of external clients who target different audience segments with different offers.\n\nIt is critical, from a customer satisfaction perspective, to constantly monitor all of their clients’ campaigns to ensure the high-quality leads coming from registrations are delivered to every client on time. To that end, project managers want to know the status of every campaign at a moment’s notice, what departments are currently working on which campaigns, and which campaigns need to be prioritized to reach the client’s promised delivery end-date and target goals.\n\nTo be successful, project managers needed more in-depth insight into all their live campaigns collecting registrations and campaigns soon-to-be-launched. Because IT World Canada conducts strict quality control procedures and they only provide top-quality leads to their clients, campaign managers needed to have a better view into how many leads were in the queue and how far along the leads were in the qualification process.\n\nOther challenges IT World Canada faced included clients requiring individualized formatting for their leads reports to align with their CRM system configuration. As well, campaign managers and staff needed a convenient way to easily access the different software tools and files used in managing each individual campaign.

With over 300 employees and over a dozen locations across the United States, this privately held company is a leading business-to-business wholesale distributor of equipment and related parts. The Company offers customers access to an inventory of over 12,000 products as well as maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) parts from over 400 manufacturers. The distributor had been using Entrinsik Informer since 2006. Prior to implementing Informer, only a few individuals within the company conducted data analysis. They used spreadsheets containing a tremendous number of rows. Due to the time-consuming complexity of working with this data, only one person had intimate knowledge of the information and was able to glean meaningful insight through analysis. The Director of the company’s BI Department previously worked there and used an early version of Informer. After leaving the distributor, he returned in 2017 and was asked to build a new business intelligence architecture that would enable people throughout their organization to easily access and analyze data to make better and more timely business decisions. Not only had the company been growing organically, it had also grown through acquisition by acquiring multiple businesses in 2017. The challenge this presented lied in pulling data from the different businesses to get a comprehensive view into the overall business. One of the newly acquired companies continued to use their own systems for data capture and reporting. Still, the BI Director needed to track metrics and key performance indicators (KPI’s) and produce operational reports for the combined business. In addition, the distributor’s business development group relied on him to pull together consolidated reporting and dashboard views for bi-monthly board meetings. According to the BI Director, it was also important to build out stories for analytics, for example to understand the new company’s buying journey work flow, including: Work orders created, When work was completed, When work orders were turned into billing, When work orders were turned into invoices, When invoices were sent out, When payment was made. The BI Director’s vision for their new BI architecture required a modern data analytics environment that supported the success of the distributor’s growing business.

Celebrity Title Company faced significant challenges with data access and customized reporting, leading to workload inefficiencies. The basic reporting provided by their existing RamQuest title and settlement production solutions was not easily customizable without proficiency in IT database functions. This resulted in a tremendous amount of manual effort to verify and compile data, which was then dumped into Excel spreadsheets for further processing. The process was time-consuming, taking an hour to publish daily income reports and 1-2 days to complete commission reports. Additionally, the reliance on a single person to create and modify pivot tables led to inefficiencies and often resulted in missing reporting numbers and income projections.

Before implementing Entrinsik Informer, staff members at Elmhurst University were completely dependent on their IT department for report creation. IT staff were spending hours of valuable time writing queries in Query Builder from their Colleague database and manually customizing delivered reports for specific needs. Reports were distributed to end-users as one-off reports or through mnemonics and often times needed to be modified by someone in IT, taking hours or even weeks to complete. Non-IT staff had no way to access the real-time data that they needed without taking valuable time away from IT. In order to run analytics, IT staff at Elmhurst had to manually export data from the database, send the data to another office to run specified analytics externally, then wait for the results to be returned.\n\nRon Darschewski, Jr., Associate Director of Computer Services and Ellucian Colleague Administrator for Elmhurst University, saw first-hand the problems caused by the lack of an efficient reporting solution. “The major inefficiencies were that end-users required IT to do the work for them; this took hours away from work that IT could be doing, including creating system customization for the betterment of the institution,” said Darschewski.\n\nElmhurst needed a reporting and analytics solution that would allow end-users to access, create, and run customized reports, as well as streamline the analytics process, all without assistance from IT. Users needed a true self-service solution that would give them access to the real-time data they needed, with full reporting capabilities and a user-friendly interface.

Canadore College in North Bay, Ontario, Canada faced significant challenges in managing and utilizing large volumes of data for program reviews and student performance analysis. The college needed a way to filter and present data in a digestible format for faculty and staff. The provincial government collects extensive data on student performance and school comparisons, resulting in spreadsheets with over 100,000 rows. Thomason, the Institutional Research and Strategic Analyst, struggled to break down this data for effective use. Additionally, the college required a system compatible with Ellucian Banner to present their own school data, including application information, key performance indicators (KPIs), and academic performance. The inability to filter large data sets and present them in an understandable format hindered collaboration and timely academic interventions.

The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, South Carolina is the oldest medical school in the southern United States with more than 3,000 students and 800 residents. The university is comprised of six colleges including Dental Medicine, Graduate Studies, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy. The Medical University of South Carolina also includes medical and research centers, along with a public hospital. Stan Sulkowski is the Director of University Reporting and analyzes student data for all six colleges. With his technical background, Sulkowski and his team had access to and understood the complex data structures of Ellucian Colleague, such as which very similarly named computed columns or fields to use, but it is difficult to transmit that knowledge to coworkers. Student data requests could be bottlenecked as the team frequently fields several concurrent demands for data. Most data transformations had to be completed post hoc, with data moving from Colleague to CSV to Excel, where formulas and pivot tables would then finally be run. The university did not have a turn-key data filtering solution to supply end-users with only the information that was relevant to them. The Financial Aid team, for example, would have to manually comb through and collate data from multiple sources and years for some of their reporting, taking up valuable time. The university also had an inefficient system for recurring jobs that was especially cumbersome if run times needed to be changed.

Full Sail Partners in Steamboat Springs, Colorado specializes in client-focused consulting, business strategy, data architecture and software solutions for over 1,000 project-based companies in industries such as architecture, engineering, and environment, amongst others. Wendy Gustafson, General Manager of Full Sail Partners, oversees accounting and human resources, and helps clients develop financial solutions for their organizations. Gustafson is responsible for the creation of a wide variety of templates for Full Sail and for clients including financial reporting, governmental forms, RFPs, and invoicing. Producing these templates was an extremely manual and overly complicated process. If fields were entered incorrectly in the template, such as an incorrect date on an agreement, Gustafson had to remerge data, a highly time-consuming task. Curating data in a usable format was difficult and every client had unique requirements. Full Sail was missing a solution that could procure data in varying formats that met the specific, individualized needs of the end user.

Stevenson University in Baltimore County, Maryland, faced several challenges with their institutional processes. The university uses Ellucian Colleague for various operations, but over time, Colleague programmers became increasingly difficult to find. The university lost over 50% of their Colleague developers, making it challenging to perform necessary tasks that required IT intervention and programming knowledge. Additionally, many university processes were inefficient and lacked standardization. For instance, generating financial aid award letters was a manual process that took three to six months. Disparate reports from different sources contained conflicting information, making it difficult to determine accurate data. Different departments used different fields in Colleague for enrollment information, leading to inconsistencies in reports delivered to the president. Furthermore, the university needed a quick way to create COVID-19 reports for monitoring health, testing, and class distribution.

Southern Supply, a group of distribution and manufacturing companies, faced significant challenges in preventing check fraud. The company needed to implement positive pay to match checks issued with those presented for payment across various business units. However, there was no practical manual strategy for activating positive pay, leading to delayed payment processing. The company required a streamlined solution to protect against fraudulent activity and ensure timely payments.

Jonathan and team were lacking a scalable and easily managed solution to track data such as customer success and team performance. “Our ability to set and track goals was limited by the reporting software that was included in our title production system, and we were unable to find a satisfactory solution until we tried Informer,” said Holfinger. Northwest Title had stated objectives, but most of the tracking and reporting was solely about key financial metrics, and not on the details of what was happening within transactions. The various reporting software they had tried were not able to effectively measure response times and gaps in action items within the title and settlement transaction process. Northwest Title was only able to gauge their performance based upon order counts, numbers of closings by location, revenue numbers, and similar macro reports, and these were insufficient in providing a complete picture. In addition, the amount of time and effort it took to create visuals in Excel or using spreadsheet grids was not sustainable, nor did they create actionable change or digestible visualizations to show trends. Aside from lacking a data-tracking solution, Northwest Title was utilizing staff that served various roles to try to compile the macro-level data across departments. They did not have a dedicated, trained business intelligence employee.

Stibat, a non-profit organization in the Netherlands, faced significant challenges in managing the collection and recycling of batteries from nearly 24,000 drop-off spots. The organization relied on several different data systems, leading to labor-intensive processes and increased opportunities for errors. The complexity of analyzing large amounts of data for logistical tasks and financial accountability necessitated a new, more efficient way to handle data analysis.

C2FO needed a more agile and robust self-service BI system to build a globally accessible ecosystem for data analytics. The existing BI platforms, including Tableau, were insufficient in providing the necessary feature set for true self-service business intelligence. C2FO required a system that enabled teams to build custom data models, perform data exploration, compile interactive dashboards, and publish dynamic content. Additionally, they needed to incorporate predictive modeling into their data models to enhance decision-making and operational efficiency.

An Ontario-based importer, exporter, and distributor of food commodities, Export Packers has been around for over 80 years and is one of Canada’s largest privately held companies. Despite being a market leader with a reputation for quality, customer service, and innovation, the company wanted to take advantage of new technologies and increase efficiencies around business-to-business relationships. When John Stakel joined the company as Head of Information Technology in 2019, his mission was clear: “I was brought in to rehabilitate the technology stack. We had a tendency to be entrepreneurs at every level in the organization, which is great but very execution-oriented; we were absolutely lacking in all sorts of actionable insight.” The company’s ERP system was Microsoft Navision, running on SQL Server with a Citrix publishing tool. For business intelligence (BI), information from Navision was authored into Excel or taken directly into hundreds of Microsoft Access databases, depending on the level of integration. Either way, it was hard to get insights into inventory, sales, procurement, and the profitability of trades. “We created a scheduler because other jobs were kicking the Access databases off the system, but it was just putting a Band-Aid on the problem,” explained Stakel. “As well as investing in a new ERP system, we wanted to change the culture, the way people in the company think about information. We needed to start convincing them that there’s a different way to consume insights than a PDF and Excel spreadsheet.”

Traditionally the financial reporting team, central controllers, and site controllers would manually extract all of their accounts data from the Oracle ERP system. Reconciliation and consolidation was done and then aggregated, with any adjustments made directly in Excel. However, this caused validation issues since members of the financial team were not using the same calculations, date ranges, or sales figures.

For over 20 years, LionShare has acted as a data aggregator, helping healthcare organizations get close and stay close to patients, prospective patients, and physicians in their communities. The company uses Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing campaigns, and analytics to overcome client challenges around complex services, and achieve continuity of care in an increasingly reactive healthcare landscape. To provide insights across the entire patient journey, and to encourage more data-driven decision making, LionShare looked to move beyond the limitations of its CRM system. Reports had to be rebuilt every time and exported, which was time-consuming and inefficient. LionShare wanted to automate the process and easily distribute reports in a much cleaner format. Several analytic solutions were considered, including Power BI, Qlik, and Tableau, but Pyramid won out because of its rich feature set, ease of use, and automation.

Premier Foods faced significant challenges with its existing SAP-based data analytics system, which relied heavily on spreadsheet-based reporting and outdated data warehousing. This system lacked external data integration capabilities and built-in data visualization, leading to manual, offline reporting and limited business intelligence (BI). The need for more flexible data sourcing, faster processing, and more frequent reporting was critical. Additionally, compliance with the recent Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) legislation in the UK required integrating data sets that the current system could not support. These limitations directly impacted business efficiency and productivity, prompting Premier Foods to seek a more advanced solution.

Established in 2000 to provide affordable healthcare across eight South Florida counties, Community Care Plan (CCP) offers a wide range of health plans and local medical services to individuals and families. CCP is on a mission to promote healthier communities. To maintain the highest possible quality standards and regulatory requirements, CCP has relied on analytics and metrics to stay compliant and continually improve its services. Whether it’s more timely claim authorizations or matching services to individual needs, the aim is to deliver proactive and personalized health plans with a heart and a sense of community. Providing the business with the insights it needs to achieve its mission was proving difficult. Data was trapped in silos that made it hard to cross-correlate a member’s varying healthcare needs. Accessing claims details was taking too long because data sources were disconnected. Documents were manually entered into Excel spreadsheets or SAP Crystal Reports, and it was up to the IT department to manually compile the information that the various departments need. The goal for CCP was to see the full picture of individual members, as opposed to one metric in one silo. Implementing a more powerful BI and analytics platform became a priority.

Before Pyramid, reporting consisted of hardcopies and emailed PDFs sent to dealerships (covering all five Volkswagen Group Ireland brands) that were then compiled centrally—a very labor-intensive activity. The transition to using Pyramid didn’t require months of adjustment, extensive training, or increased staffing. In fact, according to Volkswagen Group Ireland, “Users throughout the organization were able to use Pyramid really quickly. We didn’t need to send trainers onsite to educate people because there’s no big learning curve.”

Philadelphia Healthcare is a non-profit organisation in the Netherlands that supports over 9,000 clients with various disabilities across 500 locations. Around 8,000 employees and 6,000 volunteers – aided by more than 16,000 parents and family friends – work hard to give clients independence and the best possible quality of care. Healthcare everywhere is under threat from skills shortage and rising costs, which means organisations like Philadelphia must be smart in the how they maximise resources. Jasper Drenth, Manager of Data Delivery & Analytics, recognised the part that better BI can play in keeping services affordable with less people. An obstacle to this strategy was siloed reporting systems that stored many versions of the truth. Different departments were getting different answers to the same questions. To help them on the journey to a single source of truth, a broad range of BI tools was evaluated, including Qlik, Tableau and Power BI. Pyramid was chosen, according to Drenth, because Pyramid’s people did a better job of mapping its solution to the challenges of the organisation.

As St. Joseph’s Health wrestled with rising costs and a more competitive medical environment, analytics leaders at St. Joseph’s Health were keen to use business intelligence (BI) and analytics to increased financial performance, negotiate better rates with insurers and payers, and negotiate better costs without impacting the quality of care. But despite a huge IT infrastructure that spans all its primary management units, senior decision-makers continued to use static, manual data reporting. Executives needed sophisticated data presented to them as simply and clearly as possible, shortening their path to successful decision-making.

Since it opened for business in 1935, Community Choice Credit Union has grown to become one of the most trusted and respected financial institutions in Michigan, with 22 branches across the state serving the needs of more than 115,000 members. A progressive organization offering a wide range of financial services, it has embraced eCommerce and mobile banking alongside more traditional investment and insurance products. A legacy reporting system that was slowing down plans to develop advanced analytics undermined a mission to be at the leading edge of its sector. Reports came out as Excel and CSV files, an arduous manual process that was often inaccurate and limited by the siloed systems that produced them. Several alternatives were explored, including going the CRM route with Salesforce and BI tools like Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. In the end, Pyramid Analytics won out for several reasons, as Pedro Tan, Assistant Vice President of Data Analytics, explained. “It’s a robust and flexible product in terms of data integration, and the predictive analytics toolsets are very capable,” he said. “And because we don’t have a big team, Pyramid’s support from a technical standpoint was always going to be useful, particularly in how we developed data models.”

Blokker, a leading Dutch retailer with 340 stores, faced an increasingly competitive landscape and aimed to become a data-driven organization. The company needed to move beyond basic BI tools to gain better visibility across the business and drive profitability. They migrated all transactional data into a central data warehouse but required a robust data reporting and analytics tool to sit on top of it. The legacy QlikView solution was limited to sales data and other tools added complexity without providing a centralized view of margin and stock data. A new analytics department was set up to access a single source of data for BI across various internal departments. The goal was to centralize data, visualize it, and make it available to different business units for daily, weekly, and even hourly reports to analyze store traffic and determine staff levels.

William Reed, through its insights division Lumina Intelligence, faced the challenge of meeting growing demand for advanced dashboards and reporting from different types of data users within client organizations. Previously, data was assembled in Excel spreadsheets and shared via PowerPoint presentations, which was not efficient or scalable. The objective was to ensure that insight products were used effectively by providing a flexible solution with various formats to cater to diverse user needs.

DataOrbis was finding it difficult to process the amount of data they needed to process. With their previous data visualization platforms, they constantly had to break up reports into multiple subsets of data to handle the amount of data in one report. Even worse, their clients were having to log into multiple reports to see their information. The company was also challenged by the number of small report edits and changes they received from clients monthly. Minor adjustment requests came in all the time, resulting in a frustrated data visualization team who was spending valuable time making those changes. “We were finding the solution we had couldn’t quite meet the requirements of all our end users,” Nicola says. “We have quite a wide variety of end users we report to, CEOs of companies, as well as field sales and merchandising teams in stores. We need a tool and a set of reports that cater to both those kinds of end users — and everyone in between.”

Videndum Production Solutions (VPS) faced challenges with outdated and varied static reports from their primary applications, IFS ERP software and Salesforce. The sales team received information that was no longer current, and multiple employees created slightly different reports, leading to inconsistencies. The company had been using BI Office and other tools like Business Objects, Crystal Reporting, and QlikView, but needed a more advanced BI solution to deliver a single source of truth and granular analytics.

The University of Pretoria (UP) is a multi-campus public research university in South Africa, teaching over 50,000 students across seven campuses. With an 83.5 percent pass rate and 93 percent of graduates employed within six months of qualifying, UP is one of Africa’s top universities. On a mission to further improve student success rates, the UP was looking to advance its analytics capabilities. “We implemented an evidence-based approach to support our number one strategic goal to improve student access and success, therefore using student data to intervene in time, not after the fact, if a student is underperforming,” explained Dolf Jordaan, Deputy Director of eLearning. “We needed an integrated cloud-based solution data eco-system in our approach to improving student success—you can’t just put words on strategic documents focusing on student success without using data.” Analytics from the Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS), which both students and lecturers use, provided reports on each course and numerous performance course reports to help identify students who were at risk of falling behind. But a more holistic institutional view was needed, one that could pull in other data sources, including an institutional resource of historical data used for national reporting, student surveys, and the PeopleSoft Student Information system that held campus data. When some systems and data sources were migrated to the cloud with Amazon Web Services, there was an opportunity to develop a more sophisticated scalable approach. The goal was to provide Faculty Student Advisors and other key stakeholders with an intelligence platform for digging deeper into descriptive and predictive analytics. As a Blackboard partner, the Pyramid platform was a natural fit for UP in 2013.