Reliance Life Insurance was facing several challenges with their reporting process. The process was manual, with employees having to extract data from the Life Asia software and compile them in Excel. This was not only time-consuming but also led to issues with accuracy and consistency between reports. There were no linkages between the Excel sheets, which made comparative studies difficult and delayed decision-making. The company needed a solution that could provide customized solutions to their clients, both individual and corporate, and provide access to reporting tools that could analyze the data and drill down to the bleeding end or profitable sources.

Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC), a leading UK law firm, was seeking to upgrade its IT infrastructure and software to ensure business excellence and provide its partners and lawyers with the best tools for their jobs. The firm recognized the need for a more astute use of technology to enhance their knowledge management functions, especially in the face of tightening internal corporate legal budgets. RPC wanted a business intelligence tool to create a support service to help lawyers and partners view, analyze, and interact with data about legal matters and monitor financial performance more transparently and effectively. Senior staff at RPC were also expressing frustrations with their previous ways of working with matter management. They wanted a more understandable way of examining the figures in the accounting system and to interpret whether particular matters they were handling were financially managed correctly.

Robinsons Brewery, one of the UK's largest regional brewers, was facing a challenge with its existing reporting system. The company had a vast amount of information to manage, stemming from its estate of over 370 public houses and its expansion into wholesale, free trade, off-trade activity, and state-of-the-art brewing and bottling facilities. The existing system was inefficient and expensive, taking up to two weeks to extract data from different sources such as Dynamics NAV, SQL data warehouse, and Excel. This time-consuming process was hindering the company's growth, and a more efficient and economical system was needed.

Roland Scandinavia A/S, a leading distributor of musical instruments and large-format color printers in the Nordic countries, was struggling with managing a rapidly increasing volume of data from procurement, storage, and sales. The company had invested in the ERP system Scala to help create the needed overview, but it soon became obvious that it was difficult to draw out useful data. The manual reports in different systems were not providing the necessary insights and the company was in need of a solution that could provide a comprehensive overview of the company data.

Roxcel Group, a leading global retailer and wholesaler of paper and cartons, was facing challenges in managing its international transit trade due to its intense growth and presence in diverse markets. The company needed to gain an overview of all orders, flow of goods, and funds. The existing ERP solution was no longer sufficient to control the international transit trade. The company also needed to provide analysis capabilities on top of its internal ERP application and consolidate data across its global branches. The company was considering developing an analysis solution by itself.

Royal Jordanian Airlines, the flag carrier of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, was struggling to manage the increasing volumes of big data in its Oracle system. The airline needed a better understanding of the business, which required detailed data on many aspects of operations, including fuel consumption, cabin and cockpit functions, mail and courier traffic, and catering costs. The airline relied heavily on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for business discovery, but pulling data from disparate sources was time-consuming and required dedicated IT resources. It took the airline almost a month to aggregate data for a static report and then process the data. Given the highly competitive nature of the aviation industry, Royal Jordanian required a cost-effective business discovery platform that was sensitive to changes in market conditions.

Ruffer LLP, an investment management firm with 85 staff and just under £4.5 billion in funds under management, was facing challenges with their data management and analysis activities. They were heavily reliant on large internal spreadsheets for MIS, which were increasingly time-consuming and resource-intensive to manage. The firm wanted to move away from this 'spreadsheet mentality' that is common in many businesses. Additionally, the disparate data sources were making it difficult for Ruffer staff to update data and check for errors. This cumbersome data management was leading to concerns about potential inaccuracies, a problem Ruffer was determined to avoid.

SABMiller India had stored all of its data on Microsoft SQL Server and ran its Enterprise and Resource Planning (ERP) system on SYSPRO for its commercial business operations of Finance, Manufacturing and Sales and Distribution. All other business processes were supported by over 45 applications and as a result, the company was unable to generate reports by combining data from multiple applications. SAB Miller India needed reporting and analysis to provide the appropriate level of depth and flexibility in order to comply with statutory requirements, as well as for making crucial business decisions. The company was also dealing with reporting challenges. The team were pulling together multiple data sources into one report, which was a time consuming process, and an inaccurate method for reporting.

Sahlgrenska University Hospital faced the challenge of integrating data from Siemens Melior patient journal system with five other hospital systems. The hospital needed to provide medical professionals with faster access to critical information to identify and treat any complications from cranial surgery. The existing system was not efficient in measuring patient flows, groupings, and costs. The information about the patient was spread in different places, making it extremely difficult to get the basic data for decision making fast enough.

Salto Systems, a global manufacturing company specializing in electronic access control systems, was in need of a balanced scorecard in a single tool. The company wanted to deploy this tool across its sales, accounts, quality control, and aftersales returns business units. The company's managers were looking for a technology that could provide all the capabilities that used to require a complete package of products. The company began the deployment of the business intelligence (BI) application in September 2009 and completed it in April 2010.

Scania Denmark, a world leader in the sales and service of heavy trucks and buses, faced several challenges. The company needed to improve coordination between sales, finance, service, production, and shipping. The production team required visibility into product performance, usage, and service. The IT staff was under pressure from producing multiple reports on IBM System i (AS/400) information. Scania Denmark was using a number of different applications on different platforms, including generic reporting systems. It was crucial for Scania to quickly retrieve and compile all necessary information, and train its organization to use this information proactively.

Schenker, a leading provider of integrated logistics services, was facing several challenges. The company wanted to maintain its status as one of the world's leading providers of integrated logistics services. It aimed to improve customer service quality with reliability and on-time delivery rates. Additionally, Schenker wanted to maximize cost efficiencies while minimizing its environmental footprint. The company needed a solution that could help it track and report on the status, location, and timing of shipments to improve on-time delivery and track container loads to ensure moving at capacity and minimizing fuel and environmental costs.

Schenker España, a leading Spanish shipping company and a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn (DB) Schenker, was in need of a global information analysis system that could be deployed in the shortest time possible. The company uses diverse technology platforms, each with corporate applications for each specific business area, and an SAP/R3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for financial and logistics management. These platforms include Windows, Citrix, VMWare, Oracle, and various UNIX/Linux-based systems. The company had evaluated various business intelligence (BI) tools and began to develop a pilot project with Business Objects, though this never became a reality. In addition, it had spent most of its available resources in the early stages.

SEB Group, a North European financial group, was facing challenges in gaining a better understanding of its insurance customers and portfolio. The company wanted to improve cross-selling of products and increase customer share of wallet. Additionally, SEB was looking to improve IT project management within its merchant banking division. The company spans four divisions of merchant banking, retail banking, wealth management, and life insurance for 400,000 corporate customers and institutions, and 5 million private customers. With ~300 billion in assets, SEB achieved ~$6 billion in revenue with 20,000 employees.

The Sistema de Emergencias Médicas (SEM) is a public enterprise within the Health Department assigned to the Servicio Catalán de la Salud (Health Department of Catalonia). It is responsible for handling outpatient casualties and emergencies as well as emergency medical transport via the emergency number. In the past year alone it has dealt with over four million calls. As part of its strategy for continuing improvement, the SEM decided to develop a system to increase actual speed and efficiency ratios in its service to the public. The system required a tool that would support the development of management control methodologies and, specifically, enable scorecard implementation across an organisation employing 701 staff and 3,720 associates with an annual budget of €245.7 million.

Shoppers Stop, a leading Indian retail department store, was facing challenges with its data analysis process. The company had been using traditional BI tools and Microsoft Excel for internal reporting, but the process was both limited and time-consuming. The team was seeking a new business discovery solution to improve its data analysis with the long-term goal of streamlining business operations and ultimately increasing sales. The company wanted to enable a 'self-service' data analysis model and increase the efficiency of data analysis.

Siemens Turbomachinery Equipment was facing challenges with their existing data analysis tool, Microsoft Excel, which was too static with limited performance and high administrative costs for data assessment. The assessments were only possible by calling in the IT department. The company wanted to improve the transparency of production, taking due account of the current manufacturing information available. They also aimed to achieve a significant reduction in the costs of producing key data and analyses. The firm’s various production processes accumulate between 200,000 and 500,000 sets of such data. Siemens Turbomachinery Equipment also wanted to make it possible for the various specialist units to call up and analyse key data without help from the IT department.

Siempelkamp Maschinen-und Anlagenbau, a machine and plant construction company, was facing challenges in maintaining transparency in their figures, project calculations, and deadlines. The construction of a plant can take 12-15 months from the planning stage to sign off, and throughout this period, all the managers involved must constantly make target/actual comparisons to ascertain progress status. The key questions were whether they were still within deadlines, whether all materials could be delivered and used on schedule, and whether all budgetary costs were being met. The company needed a tool that would allow them and indeed the users themselves, anytime and anywhere, to make the analyses and evaluations they needed for project control without having to rely on IT.

SI International, a leading provider of mission-critical information technology and network solutions to the U.S. Federal Government, was facing a challenge of centralizing and simplifying the flow of information into operational and management reports on more than 400 IT projects at more than 100 high-profile customer sites. The company was struggling with costly, hard-to-implement, and hard-to-maintain traditional BI initiatives. The company was delivering more than 400 customer-critical projects with employees at about 30 company offices and over 100 customer sites. The company supports federal government customers like the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of the Census, Federal Communications Commission and other Federal agencies.

The National University of Singapore (NUS) was tasked with the challenge of reinvigorating its industry learning process and building students' understanding of data analytics. The university wanted to bring practical industry experience into learning practices. Keith Carter, Adjunct Associate Professor at the Business School in Decision Sciences and APAC Regional President 1st Call Consulting, was given the task of developing a new curriculum that would engage students with the industry and practice, moving them away from a typical textbook learning method. He had only two weeks to develop this curriculum and was given a completely blank sheet to work from.

SinnerSchrader, one of the leading interactive agencies in Germany, was facing a challenge in controlling advertising across various communication channels due to its increasing complexity. The calculation of advertisement success indicators for extensive advertising campaigns was becoming more difficult in times of hybrid purchasing models and primary data sources. Furthermore, client-specific overviews needed to be quickly available for analysis and media consultancy.

Sony Europe, a leading Japanese manufacturer of electronic consumer products, was in need of a quick, reliable business intelligence (BI) solution capable of covering multiple analysis scenarios. The company, which had a turnover in Spain of €1.166 billion in 2009, recognized the need for a BI tool that could integrate various sources of information into a single BI environment. The company sought a solution that could assist with decision-making and increase the degree of independence of each of the business areas.

South Staffs Water, a water utility serving 1.29 million people and 38,000 businesses in the West Midlands of the United Kingdom, was facing a challenge of information overload. The company had over 100 static reports, making it difficult to develop a single version of the truth from their raw data. This data was housed in multiple sources including Oracle, Excel spreadsheet software, and Microsoft Access. The company needed to reduce these reports to between 20 and 30 to avoid complete information overload. Their vision was for one consolidated reporting front end that gave their users a single version of the truth. Additionally, the company was under constant scrutiny from the Office of Water Services (Ofwat), its regulator, and needed to meet external challenges from them.

Standard Life, a subsidiary of the Edinburgh-based Standard Life financial services group, was facing challenges in monitoring broker performance in near real time. The company was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with extracts from Microsoft SQL server data management software to prepare monitoring reports for distribution to management by email messaging. This process was laborious and time-consuming. Standard Life had two immediate priorities for any new business intelligence (BI) software. The first was for a persistency report showing which insurance policies have lapsed by broker for visibility by high ranking executives and actuaries. The second was to create a Management Information Pack with daily and monthly sales reports by broker for overview by senior management and sales managers.

Subaru Italia, the official importer of Subaru for Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia, faced several challenges. The company needed to improve sales, dealer and garage management with the flow of vehicle orders. They also needed to manage credits and invoicing processes more efficiently. The company was looking for an easy-to-use business analysis system that could adapt with the company’s growth. Subaru Italia had been using business intelligence software since 1996, but as the company grew and the database evolved, they needed a tool with faster and simpler development capabilities. The company also needed an easy-to-deploy, dynamic and flexible tool to improve the sales area and management of its several dealers and garages.

SunOpta, a leader in the natural and organic foods and natural health products markets, faced challenges in reporting and data analysis due to rapid growth and acquisitions. The company lacked overall visibility into companywide sales, finance, and operations. It also struggled to quickly integrate data from newly acquired or existing business units with differing enterprise software systems for shareholder reporting and strategic planning purposes. SunOpta needed to upgrade its existing disparate BI and reporting solutions, including Oracle BIEE, to maximize profitability with a daily view of gross profit performance and reduce inventory exposure and related costs.

Svedala Municipality was facing the challenge of controlling operating costs without jeopardizing service levels to constituents. They needed to analyze information from disparate data sources and deploy a solution that did not require support from expensive consultants. As a result of a major reorganization in the healthcare sector, managers with increased budget responsibility needed a tool that was easy to use. Previously, managers had been forced to manually print out and compare data from different systems to be able to review all costs associated with any given decision.

Veritix’s transactional database was used for both production purposes and reporting. As a result, it wasn’t optimized for analytics and performance was a concern. Running analytics on the production machine would have overwhelmed system resources. Rojas’ team decided to create a separate data warehouse which would store a decade of event data, as well as additional information to enrich analyses such as weather, drive times, and fan income. The project goals were twofold: to develop a high-performance analytics data warehouse and to tune the existing production database for transactions. Veritix was primarily using Oracle, but they also had some Microsoft SQL Server databases. As they looked to expand their data warehouse, they performed a cost analysis of a traditional, on-premises data warehouse and found that it would cost millions to achieve the performance levels that they required.

When Ian Kane, Senior Data Warehouse Architect, joined Wombat Security Technologies, his job was to build a data warehouse from scratch. With the Wombat Security Technologies already on the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) in MySQL, moving the data to a Postgres database Amazon RDS was a natural choice given that they were already on the Amazon Cloud. Most of the ETL coding would be usable on a standard Postgres RDBMS. Because they regenerate their data warehouse every 15 minutes doing ETL, they needed a solution that could do log-based change data capture (CDC) to migrate their data continuously.

The Ottawa Paramedic Service was facing challenges with its static and siloed data. The service was relying on a reactive dispatch procedure for proactive care, which was not efficient. Hospitals had little access to information about when ambulances would be arriving, what injuries the patient had sustained, and what treatment had already been provided by paramedics. This lack of information led to a manual process susceptible to delays. With millions of rows of data being generated every week, the Ottawa Paramedic Service knew they could do more than plan for the next 24-hour period. They needed a way to improve patient response times, and effectively plan resourcing availability.